Summary
By the way, you might be working for a newspaper that doesn't have any artists to create spec ads for you. That's OK. Some of the biggest sales I've made were from ads I've done myself, just sketching them out and getting original art or making copies from the art books the newspaper had and pasting them in. Some salespeople believe that they can't sell specs if they don't have a good artist available. This simply isn't true. In fact, in my experience, it's the salespeople who don't pass the ads off to an artist but instead create the entire ad themselves, that can better explain the substance of the ad and make the sale.

Back when the Macintosh first came out, newspapers found they could hire artists to create beautiful spec ads. That's when many salespeople stopped thinking about how to get an account a response and just started dumping that responsibility on the artists, again hoping that they were psychic. Although the ads looked great, they had very little substance due to the fact that the artists were not actually psychic and didn't know enough about the account to create an effective ad. Many of these ads did not get the advertiser a response. We call ads like this, "beautifully ineffective" because they look good while not getting any response for the account. Advertisers have learned the hard way that a good looking ad doesn't automatically equate to a good response.

So, don't get too hung up on whether or not you have artists and how good they are. And read Ogilvy on Advertising. Once you send it through to an artist, it should take anywhere from a few days to a week to get it back. At some newspapers it could take more like two weeks. If you find yourself going in and conducting a great first sales call with an advertiser, only to have your art department tell you that it'll be two weeks before they'll finish it, then you might want to consider just sketching out the elements out yourself and bringing that in. You'd hate for the sale to cool off for too long, or risk having one of your competitors come in and make the sale. By the way, many art departments will also be happy to help you come up with a new look for an advertiser who is already running. This is technically not a spec ad, since it's not done on speculation. Anyway, selling the spec ad will be covered later when we go over the basics of a sales call.