Our Basic Newspaper Advertising Sales Course

Ad sales training to help you to start selling fast in your new territory
This is a sample showing just the first four chapters of this course. Buy the full course here starting at $59 
© 2015 Robert McInnis Consulting

BUY NOW

Ad Layout: Other Things About Art

There are a number of other things that you should know about artwork before you submit it with your rough sketch and ad reservation.

 

Some forms of artwork are acceptable and some are not, and it will save you and your advertisers a lot of time and aggravation if you understand the differences from the beginning.

 

Digital artwork

Artwork needs to be a higher resolution to reproduce properly in print than online. It all comes down to DPI or dots per inch. As you can imagine, it's simply a measure of the number of dots that will appear next to each other within an inch.

 

Everything you see on the Web is 72 dpi. If there's artwork on your advertiser's Web site that doesn't need to be scaled bigger for a banner ad, for example, it should be just fine to download the picture and give it to production (or give them a link to it.

 

But print requires a much higher dpi. A photograph that looks good out of your home printer needs to be around 300 dpi to look good. Even 200 dpi is passable. It's about the same with newspapers and the nicer the reproduction of your publication (think glossy magazine), the closer to 300 dpi the images need to be to look right.

 

This means if your advertiser has told you to pull an image off their Web site for the print publication, it probably won't hold up, unless it's a giant image that needs to be dramatically shrunk down (and the dots along each inch increased in the process) for print.

 

So, good rule of thumb is, while it's often just fine for digital ads, never pull images or logos off of Web sites for a print ad unless you want to frustrate the production team and ultimately upset the advertiser once the ad is published.

 

Instead, always be ready to ask for the hi-res originals of the images. Most likely, they have them somewhere or their Webmaster or brochure designer does. Or maybe you have it already in your files from a previous ad.

 

I do a lot of ad design training for newspaper production departments and ad reps not understanding image resolution requirements has got to be their number one complaint. So break the mold and delight the production department by ensuring the resolution is right (and at least acknowledge it and apologize when it isn't).

 

Printed material

In general, try to get digital art whenever possible.

 

When you can't, art should be clean and, again, its image area should not be stapled, taped, written upon or marked in any way. The only exception is that at many newspapers it can be a good idea to write your name and territory number along the outside the image area if there is space to help it make its way back to you if it gets lost. But never enter the image area or it may be rendered useless to you and the designers.

 

It's always better to get artwork for an ad directly from the advertiser. This saves the art department the time of trying to find any generic artwork from art service to which they might subscribe. Art from the advertiser will almost always be more specific and therefore more effective in terms of response.

 

For example if your account sells furniture, it's always better to get images of the actual furniture from the account--perhaps those provided to him by the manufacturer--because your art department is likely to have only a limited selection of artwork of furniture that probably won't accurately represent the account's selection.

 

Often, designers that are not provided with artwork from the salesperson are forced to use photos or line art from art services. Line art, or line drawings of products, while it is often better than nothing, is usually not as good as a photograph of the actual product.

 

Line art typically gives the ad a downscale look. That's fine if the furniture store is a downscale store and wants people to get the feeling from the look of the ad that they will get a bargain on low-quality furniture.

 

However, if the store is actually selling upscale furniture, it usually will be able to convey that most effectively with photographs.

 

It's likely that your artists will be able to handle anything you give them, but ask around and you'll quickly find out the capabilities at your publication. Here are some things that most newspapers won't be able to easily work with, but will probably accept them and try to work with them anyway:

 

Printed pre-screened materials, or artwork that has a visible dot pattern, can cause some problems. Almost everything in published form has a screen or dot pattern, although most of the time it's imperceptible. Once art is broken into a dot pattern, it can't be scaled down without pushing those dots together, which results in the dots filling in and creating black splotches in your ad.

 

Artists will try to salvage this by creating a second dot pattern on top of the first. This unfortunately creates a "moire" pattern, which looks like a "plaid" or chain-link fence pattern on the artwork. Your designers should be able to minimize this, however it isn't an ideal situation and the more of a dot pattern you see on the artwork, the harder it will be to work with.

 

Other types of artwork that are difficult to work with are tearsheets (art cut out of a newspaper, for example), faxes, and copies made from copies. If your advertiser sends you a logo or artwork via fax or asks you to take it from a tearsheet, your artists will almost always need to recreate the art. While most publications encourage their artists to help create and recreate logos and art when necessary, it is very time consuming and it would be much better for you to provide the art in any other way possible.

 

Next: More on digital artwork

 

 

ABOUT THIS SITE  |  This site is the home of Bob McInnis' Response Oriented Selling newspaper ad sales training program. It also shares a number of insights as well as offers a basic new hires program for brand new ad reps just looking to stabilize their territory.

 

Download our free e-book

What's in it?
A free, 25-page e-book to ensure your next training initiative is an unprecedented success.

FREE DOWNLOAD

©2015 Robert McInnis Consulting

All rights reserved.