Page 179 - Duct Tape Marketing

163Chapter 11: Creating Print Ads

ߜ Open rate: The highest price you’ll pay for placing a particular ad one
time with no discounts. Also called the one-time rate and the basic rate.

ߜ Pick-up rate: Many newspapers offer a greatly discounted price when
advertisers rerun an ad with no changes within a five- or seven-day
period.

ߜ Short rate: The amount you’ll owe to the publisher if you don’t earn the
rate for which you contracted. If you sign a contract to run a certain
amount of advertising but over the contract period you run less adver-
tising than anticipated, you will owe the publisher the difference
between the rate for which you contracted and the rate you actually
earned.

Placing Newspaper Ads

There are more opinions about what works in newspaper advertising than
there are newspapers, and that adds up to a lot of differing ideas. Some advis-
ers tell you to avoid the Sunday edition and the day that the grocery store
ads appear because they’re crammed with ads and yours will get lost in the
chaos. Others counter with the fact that those big and busy issues are
crammed with ads because they’re the best-read papers of the week. Some
people tell you to place clever, small-space ads with high frequency, and
others advocate dominating the paper with big-format ads even if you can
afford to run them only on a few carefully chosen dates.

Most of the advice you hear is absolutely right — but only some of the time.
So how do you proceed?

ߜ Know your target prospect so that you can make an educated guess
about which days and sections of the paper that person is likely to read.

ߜ Know your ad strategy (see Chapter 8) so that you can time your place-
ments to accomplish your advertising objective.

ߜ Know how newspaper advertising works so that you can prepare a
schedule that takes advantage of media discounts.

Scheduling your placements

Myths are rampant about which day gets the most readership, but the fact is
this: From Monday through Friday, the number of people who open their
papers varies only 3 percent, with Tuesday’s paper outpulling the others
because in most markets it carries the food ads. If you want your ad to gener-
ate results, heed these tips: