As our football section gets ready..

Our publisher told us last month we should expect at a minimum a firm 36 pages, which is down from the usual 40 but not a disaster.

Guess what? I wanted to find out how ad sales were going, and THEY HADN'T STARTED SELLING YET!

They have three days to sell a 36- or 40-page tab before we get our dummies. Let that sink in.

My guess is this will be our last tab, which won't break my heart. I'd rather do a countdown for the month of August and give people a reason to buy the paper the whole month instead of just one day.

 

Anyone ever wonder how hard it must be to sell ads? I think I'd like to sit in on one of their ads calls just to see the process.

"Hi (LOCAL BUSINESS), my name is Shirley from the Podunk Times. We have a special 40-page section that just about everyone in our area waits all year for. Would you like to advertise in it?"

"Oh, you would? Shit, I wasn't prepared for that."

 

High school football is huge and we have a high school football section every Saturday throughout the season. We cover every game. Been doing it 3-4 years.

Last spring, our prep editor met with a bunch of ad salespeople. He said, "Please raise your hand if you have sold an ad for the football section." He got three hands up.

He looked at a guy who didn't have his hand up and asked him, "What do your clients say when you ask them to advertise in the football section?" The guy said he didn't even know we had a football section.

 

well, we do a college/pro/high school section. 128 pages, ad to news ration this year is 58 to 42, ad heavy. Record for ads. Lots of full page ads. Ad folks had a competition all summer to sell ads and it paid off. Not trying to brag, but it's nice to know selling ads doesn't suck everywhere.

 

It's nice to know that there are ad departments out there that still try to sell ads.

 

Our football contest took a big hit last year, but seems to be back on track for bigger and better advertising this year.

 

Yup, two of our three staffers pulled an all-nighter last year, including myself. Not fun. We had to re-write stories on the fly because, then, we didn't get our dummies until two days before. So we found out we didn't have enough copy. Wasn't a complete train wreck though. I just hope we get our dummies well before we go to press.

 

I get the case that this may be our last tab as well, if not next-to-last. Our ad department seems to be unable to sell special sections well, even if it is a big draw like high school football.

Our ad department, and I imagine most in general, seem to be masters in procastination.

 

Finally got pages on Friday. They chopped it from 40 pages to 32.

And in regards to comments on ad sales, I have no clue what those people do. One of our 2 flagship schools, in the second-largest classification, is viewed as a state title contender, coming off a 12-1 season. They sold the same ad they did last year. You have to try to not sell.

 

I have to have an "us vs. them" mentality, but it's hard not to. We cover about 60 prep football teams in our area, so it's a decent coverage zone. Last year we went from featuring the divisions in the dailys to putting them all in a tab and it was met with a lukewarm response from the ad department. We also put out a playoff tab and that went a little better because they were able to target their advertisements to team-specific areas.

However this year we want to do a blowout, one-page for each team with an ad package. We met with the ad deparement and it was almost like they were upset for the workload. My editor, who deals with them regularly, said they think they're wasting their time on the smaller ads and they're all too busy chasing those full-page car ads for the commission - but they don't realize those dried up five years ago.

I hate being the non-team player sitting in the office and wondering how a mom-and-pop place like Springfield Pizza wouldn't fall over themselves being the sponsor for the Springfield High School football team preview page - especially when they can add "Springfield Pizza wishes the Isotopes well in 2009!" or something like that to the ad. I almost want to call these places myself. It's so frustrating and I hate fighting people on my own team. It's not like we're all not looking over our shoulders in this day and age.

 

Precisely.

My biggest problem is that, no matter how advanced a warning you give them, it seems like they still screw something up.

I told someone who works for my place about our spring all-area insert four months ahead of time and reminded her about it once every two weeks. It got to the point where we were making jokes about how often I was reminding her about it.

The ad department STILL screwed it up.

I guess I just wish they held themselves to the same standards that my coworker and I do on the sports editorial side.

 

I have made this point before on other threads, but I don't mind repeating myself. If you were good at selling things, would you consider selling newspaper advertising space as an appealing career alternative in 2009?
Journalism, horrible warts and all, offers non-monetary rewards that salesmanship does not.