Our Basic Newspaper Advertising Sales Course

Ad sales training to help you to start selling fast in your new territory
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© 2015 Robert McInnis Consulting

Ad Layout: Proofs

Even if you laid out everything properly and keyed up everything the right way, there's no guarantee that the ad will appear correctly in the newspaper. An ad can pass through many hands on its way to getting into the print and digital versions of your newspaper. And remember that when you're creating a brand new product every day or week from scratch, there will always be problems--the ad doesn't make it in the paper, it's in the wrong place, the phone number is wrong, etc.

 

For example, one newspaper I worked for once ran an ad for a doctor specializing in spider vein treatments, though the ad appeared with the headline "spider vein transplants". The same newspaper made it on the Letterman show when they ran an ad for a restaurant that was supposed to feature broiled chicken, but instead read "broiled children".

 

Unfortunately, you'll probably have your own similar stories soon. In fact, you'll avoid a lot of surprises and disappointments if you just assume that one of your ads will appear wrong in each issue.

 

Something that will certainly help but still won't save you all the time is to request a proof.

 

When you send in the ad reservation form (or reserve it on your system) with your ad layout, copy and artwork attached, you can request to see a copy of the final ad that production creates before it goes into the newspaper.

 

This will mean that you'll have to get the ad to production a little earlier than normal, but at first, or at any time you find your ads aren't coming out the way you hoped, you might want to request a proof.

 

A proof is basically just a PDF or printout of the ad and, as you'll soon see, there should be a field on your newspaper's ad reservation form for you to mark that you need a proof.

 

A proof is not something you or your advertiser requests to see how an ad will look before fine-tuning it. Before a proof is even requested, the look of the ad should have been decided upon and communicated clearly to production. The idea of a proof is simply to check the accuracy of the contents of the ad. If you change the proof and hand it back to production, those changes should only be to those parts of the ad that appear differently than what you requested on the layout. Although in an emergency, production will make any changes you need, try to avoid that if at all possible.

 

In those cases, you should have requested a spec ad, not a proof.

 

Also, keep in mind that you can't request a proof until the ad is reserved and the account has agreed to buy the ad. A proof will simply give him the opportunity to check for any mistakes.

 

Next: Managing proofs