About Atlas AdManager
In upgrading the CP4 to CP5, CMN partnered with industry leading venders to improve the advertising components that CP had historically developed internally.

The new tools provided by Atlas for online ad management are a major improvement for deploying ads. These tools add efficiency, enable the ability to monetize inventory effectively and facilitate better targeting for campaigns (target by section, by day part, by keyword, among other criteria).  This service will help optimize the use of your online ad inventory by cycling more ads into a fixed number of ad positions.

Atlas is a subsidiary of Microsoft Inc. and used by several mainstream media outlets. The core engine of ad delivery is very sophisticated and can smoothly serve multiple campaigns through overlapping time periods with accuracy (the servers recalibrate priorities of competing campaign needs every 30 seconds).

Atlas Ad Manager is a robust system with many sophisticated options. This is important to note as you will see once you are familiar with the tools that there are extra fields or redundant tools on competing levels. These artifacts are the result of development needs of other Atlas clients.

The articles for Atlas Training in this site attempt to illustrate the procedures most appropriate to the needs of a CMN partner newspaper.  Should your newspaper need increased functionality, that can be accommodated very easily.  Expanded tools need only to be unlocked for your account (no new development needed).

That said, to help minimize mistakes as you familiarize yourself with the new system, we advise keeping campaigns simple.  To place a campaign, it requires only 3 simple steps in the Atlas graphical user interface (GUI):
Create the Advertiser
Upload a Creative
Create a Campaign

There are step-by-step explanations and printable materials to get a handle on these procedures.  Browse the Advertising section.

Changes to the System
Because of this upgrade and in part the result of market research, CMN changed the number of ads on any one page.  CP powered sites will now only have 2 national ad spots and 3 local ad positions (5 total) – see image.

This change facilitates more focused use of the inventory and allows CMN newspapers to shift to the CPM billing model with sound tools and data to back up the change in rate cards.