Tales from the Crypt, I mean ad department

You lost me when you excluded the part about someone in editorial having a bit of foresight and asking about the tab.

 

My tab is being proofread by others on the staff before it gets sent over. One of the reporters who doesn't care about sports is checking one of the pages. I'm interested in seeing what she thinks are mistakes because she doesn't understand the terminology.

 

That happened once at a weekly shop. I pitched a football tab, which we had never done, and it got positive feedback from advertising and management. I planned, made freelance assignments for art and copy, trotted out to a few places for stories and got ready for a 16-page tab. The day we got the dummies for the week it was running, there was no tab. I had to ask around and finally got a "well, advertising couldn't sell it so we're not doing it." Which raised two questions: a) how can you sell no advertising for a football tab when all our competitors and similarly-sized papers in the region and state could with ease, and b) you're having meetings about the tab apparently, but at no point it occurs to anyone to clue in the guy who's ginning up all the copy to flow around the ads that may or may not exist? Then I find out that the ad folks may never have tried to sell it in the first place; if they couldn't, that's disappointing but fine; but again, someone tell me so I can prepare a contingency plan for a cancelled tab?

It worked out; I was able to get extra space and enough open (tabloid) pages in my normal section to run everything except a couple of features that I banked for later use, but the lack of communication and consideration was a bummer at a place about which I harbored few complaints.

 

We used to have a proofreader like that. A retired school teacher, probably in her 70s, who couldn't tell you the difference between the Big 10 and a Big Mac. She always complained because A1 didn't get to her until an hour before deadline, yet she would take 45 minutes to read our three sports pages and make us go from being an hour early to barely making it out on time. On top of that, she'd always flag things that are common sports terms as mistakes, like "homered" or "with 7:23 left."
After a couple of months we said screw it and just stopped giving her pages. We already had two good sets of eyes on it. If we missed something, it was on us.

 

Sounds like the paper wasn't paying commission on ads sold for that section. Was that the case? Sales reps work hardest on the ads/sections that pay commission. One of my papers stripped the commissions from some of its special sections, and that went over like a shit sandwich. Reps wouldn't sell the sections, and they died fast.

 

What you have described is total incompetence and goes on in newspapers ALL THE TIME. The ad salespeople in newspapers today are the worst salespeople in America. Low paid and just the dregs. It's just the way it is. And they do clueless things like you described all the time. All of a sudden editorial has to put out this magazine after they misled you. And you'll have to do it. That's the way it is or you get fired. Advertising departments in newspapers are so bad I can't even begin to discuss the subject.

 

I knew you'd find this thread eventually, Frederick ... and you're not wrong. If we in the newsroom missed deadlines as often as ad reps miss sales goals/revenue targets/errors in ad copy, the paper would come out once a week.

HOWEVER, I do have some empathy for the ad department, because they have to convince business owners to pay for newspaper advertising. Unless you're selling dentures, raised toilet seats or bathtubs with doors in the side, why would you advertise in a newspaper in 2015?

Personally, I wouldn't do it if the ad was free. It would admit to potential customers that all my business is with senior citizens.

 

My understanding was that they couldn't sell it because of commitments to sell existing seasonal special sections. It's something of a legacy publication, and while I would never call them lazy or even hint at it (I've seen them work, I know they're not screwing around), a lot of their accounts are legacy accounts, ones that have made the same buys for many years with little deviation. Which would have been fine, but I didn't exactly spring this on them at the last second, or do an end-around to upper management without their input. I made sure to get buy-in during the formitive stages. If they couldn't sell it, OK, I can live with that, but why not red flag it in late June when I was putting it out there, so I could change/scuttle plans accordingly?

It was actually one of my favorite journalism jobs and one that I expected I wouldn't care for at all. This was a rare significant issue, and it wouldn't normally warrant dredging up from the bowels of memory (this happened nearly 10 years ago), but the topic culled a response that was similar enough to my experience that I felt like joining in the action.

EDIT: It occurs to me that I didn't even answer your question. All ads earned commission, as far as I knew, be they regular or special-section.

 

Before I left, all we did was tabs.
I swear they devoted the majority of the newrooms staff to tabs stuff. We doing tabs and special sections almost weekly. The paper - the hard news - got pushed off the side so we could advatorials, Reader's Choice, Progress, and a shit ton of tabs. All the ad department did was sell the ads.