CAMS and ICAMS

One of my first independent projects in Jasubhai and later on with Infomedia was the CAMS and ICAMS project... CAMS stood for Competition Advertisement Monitoring System.

The challenge in those days was to get some accurate details on advertising trends over a period of time and to capture that you needed a system to capture and measure various dimensions defined as Magazines, Publications, Segments, Industry, Clients and Agencies. The challenge was typical for magazines in the special interest space as well as B2B space which was not monitored by any agency, then...

ICAM is a scalable system that is designed in ASP for its front end and uses a My SQL for its back-end Database requirement.

The purpose of the system is to monitor advertisements from across magazines and help in the following:

1) Determine market shares and competitor performance
2) Help predict future growth and trends
3) Understand advertiser and agency trends in releasing ads
4) Understand regional performances

The system captured data in an RDBMS structure across Publication, Publication group, Industry type, Magazine type, Magazine, Agency, Region, company, Ad positioning, Ad sizes, Ad types, Ad sections and Tariff rates. based on the above databases, the monthly ad patterns were captured across various magazine segments.

The Report Generation Module will look at the following reports to be generated:
1. Clientwise Reports: on Clients advertising pattern across magazine
2. Agencywise Reports: On agency advertisement release pattern across magazines
3. Segmentwise reports: On Clients advertising pattern across magazine segments
4. Industrywise reports: the kind of industries that are advertising in specific magazine segments
5. Publication Groupwise reports: On Clients advertising pattern across Publications
6. Issuewise reports: performance of specific magazine across various issues
7. Client Advertising Pattern Reports: The kind of ads that clients tend to release
8. Magazine Ratios: Key magazine ratios that indicate the health of the magazine

The above reports can be generated with the following options:
1. Datewise
2. Magazine:
3. Regions:
4. Segment:
5. Industry Type:
6. Publication Group:
7. Section:

Over 100 magazine titles and 200 issues were captured every month to give desired results on market shares...