Is your ad department this bad

Ask the designers. They're the experts. If they had their way, pages would consist of cutouts planned days in advance, AP wire stories and unedited AP cutlines.

 

I don't have a problem with designers because I can't/don't want to do it, but that was really, really funny.

 

I'd gladly help.

One year, when the ad department was days late with the dummies for a special section, one of the ad reps called to ask "When's the latest we can get this to you?" I checked my deadline sheet and fired back "you're already late. We need it now." She answered, "uhhhh, OK. Thanks." She then called my colleague, who told her what she wanted to hear.

She was also the publisher's daughter. Amazingly, I wasn't fired ... I wasn't nasty to her, but she wanted license to further abuse deadlines as always, and I wasn't going to give it to her.

Another stop was infamous for pushing back any deadline it wanted to get in late ads. Nothing like being halfway through with advance pages, only to get a call from the sorry bastards telling me that the dummies were being completely rearranged. This was also the same place that tried to question my efficiency ... "uh yeah, I was working on the pages that you continue to tear up. Efficiency?" :

Oh yeah, both were family-owned. Ad departments are one place that the chains are typically a much better place to deal with.

 

Our ad department couldn't sell one stinkin' ad for this tab.
The ad manager's response to why this happened: "Our effort sucked." You think?
The day we found out it was cut (a week before it was due to go to press), the entire ad dept. took four cigarette breaks ... in three hours. Two guys work their ass off handling cars and real estate. The other three highly attractive women were put in charge of selling the tab and of course failed. How the chick with 36DD tits and a tiny waist couldn't get one ad sold is beyond me.

 

You have a picture?

 

Just found out today that our football tab was cancelled. Was going to include four high schools, a I-AA college and the local NFL team. And, apparently, after a year of "effort" they weren't able to sell enough ads.

The fact that they knew about this since last fall bugs the shit out of me. Even worse? The local competition put one out last year and didn't seem to have much trouble getting advertisers.

We'll use our regular section to put out the previews, but I really thought we were going to be able to do something excellent that our readers were going to enjoy. Now I have to talk to the coaches who I told about our big preview tab and tell them they've been relegated to our regular section. God, I'm going to look like a jackass.

 

Such hostility toward designers Dyepack. Did one of them wrong you in another life?

As far as having things in advance, we do like to have some kind of a heads up as to what is coming in the days ahead for non deadline stories. Makes it nice to come up with a decent package, don't you think?

 

Face it -- shitty ad staffs are a fact of newspaper life. Any half-motivated ad rep realizes fairly quickly he/she can can make a lot more money working with an agency or on his/her own. Consequently, newspaper ad staffs are filled with lifers who have had more marriages than original ideas, are content doing repetitious crap while collecting the meager commision check that goes with it and are blissfully ignorant on how the rest of the publication works.

But even these dipshits can usually sell a football tab.

 

At the risk of outing myself (no one really cares anyway):

I'm at a 5K PM in the middle of butt-fucked Egypt, with an ad-sales staff of all middle-aged housewives.

And they sold the shit out of the football tab. The thing was 40 pages at well over 50 percent, with full color ads in the middle and on the back. Add in a 20-pager for the local college the same week.

How in the fuck can you not sell a HS football tab? Seriously, I just can't fathom it even being a problem.

 

You've got to try really hard to not sell a H.S. tabloid. Although our ads were down a little this year, which is good because I've always thought they oversold it anyway.

 

That's what I'm saying. You'd have to actively try not to sell it.

Give me a stack of rosters and a phone book and I'll come sell the fucker this afternoon.

 

I hate it when another department is responsible for either a fuck-up or a bad policy decision for which I have to answer. I'm so tempted to start giving out the publisher/ad manager's home telephone numbers.