Spec Ads and Ad Design: Determining Ad Size
First off, you're going to have to decide how big a spec ad to make. Some salespeople base the spec ad size on what ad size the account was running in the competitors newspaper. They make it slightly bigger then what they were running before. The problem with that is that the original ad might have been much too small for what the advertiser needed to accomplish, namely profitability. Working off of that ad size might result in low response and a lost customer.

Instead, think about how big the successful competitors are running. To compete effectively, your potential advertiser might need to get up to a size close to the competitor, even if, and perhaps especially when, the competitor is running huge ads.

Also think about how few people are about to buy the product. If there's almost nobody about to buy a product during the week the ad appears, you might have to work harder to ensure that all these few people see the ad with a larger size.

Also think about what their average sale is. If an advertiser makes a few hundred or a few thousand off of each sale, then they may be abafford to run big.

Your advertising department might also have a chart listing almost every business type out there, as well as what percentage of their gross sales is spent on advertising for each industry. If you can get the advertiser to tell you what their gross sales were last year, then you can apply this percentage, usually about 5%, to their gross sales to come up with a yearly advertising budget. Then it's a matter of dividing up the yearly budget into monthly or weekly budgets, based on his business cycles. A common place where these charts are found are in the yearly planbooks that some newspapers publish. These are magazine size calendar planner with some interesting information in there as well. You might want to ask your manager if your newspaper publishes a planbook or has these charts.