International advertising isn’t something we get to do very often. So, when we were given the job of placing an ad in an Israeli newspaper by Figaro’s Italian Pizza, we were anxious to do it. We had never done business in Israel before and we love doing something new. And really, how hard could this be? Well, what  looked like a simple enough task turned out to be quite a challenging experience.

It started out OK. A couple hours on the Internet was all it took to track down a short list of newspapers that looked like what we needed. And, with just a little more research we narrowed it down to the correct publication.

So far, so good.

Our next step was to contact the advertising department of the paper to get rates, deadlines, mechanical specs and payment procedures. That’s when the first little challenge became evident, and it wasn’t a language barrier as we expected. As it turns out, most speak English quite well over there. It was the time difference. Every e-mail, no matter how insignificant the subject, takes an entire day to get a response. That’s because their work day begins about 10:00 pm our time, and ends about 6:00 am. While I’m e-mailing, they’re sleeping, and vice versa. On a number of occasions I got up early to call them on the phone in order to speed things up. But, at this newspaper they don’t answer their phones. They let their phones collect messages that they listen to at their leisure. Add to that, my first three e-mails were not answered. My only hint that they were going through was that I was not getting a bounce-back notice. But, three unanswered e-mails equals three days of time.

For fear of looking totally incompetent to my client, I started sending several e-mails per day, so if there was anyone on the other end, they could not miss my messages. In fact, they would have to respond or continue to be annoyed by me forever. Thankfully, I finally received a polite e-mail along with an apology for not responding sooner.

Things were starting to look up.

After another few days of back-and-forth messaging, I was able to size the ad and identify a budget. I had asked how they wanted to handle payment and was told that the ad had to be paid three days prior to publication. Payment could be either by bank transfer or credit card. No surprises here.

I spoke to my banker and was told that the most practical way to handle this transaction was to use the credit card because it wasn’t very much money (it was a small ad). And, the bank guaranteed the transaction and safety of my account. So, I e-mailed my account information to the newspaper along with the art and insertion order, happy that it was done.

However, the Friday it was supposed to run, I received an e-mail saying that my card had been rejected and the ad could not run. I was embarrassed and shocked because our card was in good standing. I called my US Bank contact and he was also baffled. He could only advise me to call the service number on the back of the card. I called the number and was told that because it was from out of the country, their computerized fraud protection system had denied it. I then asked them to override the system because it was a legitimate transaction.

I was told that they could not do that. Once the computer decided to reject the transaction, they could not manually override it. They had to provide a manual security code which the Israeli newspaper must get verified when making the transaction. Only then could the payment go through. So, I asked for the code so I could give it to the newspaper.

Nope.

They could not give it to me. The newspaper had to call for it, then include it in the electronic transaction. So, I summarized all this as clearly as possible and sent it off to the newspaper. The next day I received an e-mail from the newspaper explaining that they could not call and get the manual security code because their billing department was completely computerized, and there was no provision for such an action. Great. Two computers who cannot or will not talk to each other and who have control over their human counterparts. 

Exasperated, I finally dug out an alternate credit card and sent the newspaper all new card information. Then, immediately called the number on the back of the new card telling them to expect a transaction from Israel. Miraculously, a couple days later I received an e-mail from the newspaper saying that the transaction had gone through and the ad could run. So, I asked that the ad run in the next Friday’s edition.

On about Thursday, I received another e-mail from the newspaper saying that the Friday edition I wanted had already been sold out to capacity, and the ad would not run. Over here they just add another page and keep selling space. That one really surprised me. They did include in their note that  it would run in the following Friday’s edition. Thank goodness this was not a time-sensitive ad.

I’m happy to report that the ad finally ran, I think. You see, I asked for five tear sheets after the ad ran. I was informed that they could only provide three. OK, so I’ll take three. That was about two weeks ago, and I still haven’t received any tear sheets.

Believe it or not, I actually expect to receive my tear sheets eventually. This whole experience has made me appreciate the efforts of international business people everywhere. And, no, I don’t consider myself an international businessman as a result of this. But, I got a very brief peek into their window and got a quick tutorial on how complicated things can get.

Would I do it again?

Oh yeah.

Rob Charlton

Few people, including advertising professionals, know how to calculate the expected response from a newspaper ad. A newspaper circulation of 200,000 doesn’t mean 200,000 people will be contemplating your ad.

Here are the variables you need to consider when calculating an expected response from a newspaper ad.

1. YOUR TARGET
Every product has a demographic that represents its prime target. Let’s say, for the sake of this example, that your target demographic is adults, 25 – 54

2. MARKET SIZE
If you are located in a city of 1.5 million people and the 25 – 54 demographic represents 40%, then your target population is 600,000.

3. DURATION BETWEEN PURCHASES
Since people don’t buy every product they use every day of the year, the duration between purchases is important to consider. Let’s say people buy your product one time per year on average. Then, your available market in any month is 1/12 of 600,000, or 50,000. Of course, you’ll have to take into account the seasonal fluctuations for your product and apply the same logic.

4. NEWSPAPER CIRCULATION
If your local daily newspaper has a 40% penetration in your market, calculate that against your available 50,000 market to reach 20,000 possible qualified exposures to your message.

5. READERSHIP
Not every subscriber reads every page every day. Studies have shown that if you get 10% of the subscribers to read your ad, that is a very generous number. Applying that calculation to our example reduced the number of targeted customers to 2,000.

6. YOUR MARKET SHARE
Unless you have an exclusive monopoly in your market, you have competition with some customers who are loyal to them. If your overall market share is 10%, you can apply that to the remaining targeted customers, leaving 200 as your reasonable expectation.

7. RESPONSE RATE
Assume a 2% response rate from your ad.

8. RESPONSE
Your expected response (customers making a transaction) will be 4.

These numbers can vary wildly. However, the chain of logic remains constant. The offer, size of ad, weather, lack of or heavy competition, time of year and numerous other influences can have a bearing on final results. But, this model is useful to illustrate the realities of advertising response.

We’ve been around buying media for more than 20 years, so we’ve seen just about every sales pitch, rationale and strategy there is. I’d say we’ve seen them all, but there’s always the slim possibility there might be one out there we haven’t seen yet.

More to the point, however, is that along the way, we’ve also heard from a great number of business owners and managers who are convinced they are getting the best media buy possible. No one, despite their credentials or experience, could possibly negotiate a better deal than they did.

In no case, ever, have we come across an owner-made media buy that could not be improved. And most of the improvements needed were significant. Here are some of the pitfalls of a business owner or manager negotiating his or her own media buy.

1. CHEAP SPOTS DON’T MEAN VALUE
It is in a business manager’s makeup to measure the value of something by its cost. All to often we have witnessed a business owner proudly showing the super low costs of his TV or radio commercials without taking into account the size of the audience. A half hour in timing can make a huge difference in the numbers of people who will watch or listen to the commercial. The super low cost spots are super low for a reason. There’s no audience.

2. BEST RATES COMPARED TO WHAT?
While we’re on the subject of rates, most do-it-yourselfers are convinced that they negotiated the best rates in town. What they fail to recognize is that part of a good media salesman’s job is to close the sale making the buyer thinking they got the best rate in town. And, they’re usually pretty good at doing that. A client of ours is one of the best negotiators I’ve even met. But, he turned his media buying over because he wisely recognized that he had nothing to compare his rates to in order to verify what he was paying. A media buyer buys for a number of clients, therefore has a view of the playing field that a single business owner cannot have. This client actually lowered his media costs by going through a buyer.

3. ELIMINATE ANY POSSIBILITY OF SELF INTEREST.
Objectivity is extremely important when it comes to media buying. In almost every direct situation, some media rep has managed to create a close relationship with the business owner. Often, the business owner will even consult their favorite, trusted media rep for information not related to the rep’s station. This is a huge error, regardless of the trust factor. No media rep is without a self-interest in selling his station. It can and absolutely will color any advice provided. Only an independent media professional is in a position to recommend a media mix without bias.

4. DON’T BUY WHAT YOU LIKE.
People who buy their own media tend to buy programming that they like. It’s hard to spend $3,000 on a schedule, then not see it because it’s not where you are watching or listening. But, that’s what must be done. Media has to be purchased where your customers are watching, not you. And, too often, business owners believe their customers have the same media habits as their own.

5. SPREAD IT OUT AND WATCH RESULTS DIMINISH.
Stations like to sell schedules that are convenient for them, not schedules that deliver customers to you. I have never been able to understand why they do this, but it happens repeatedly. A station will push direct advertisers into a buy that is spread out over all day parts as evenly as possible. This is so they can sell their time slots evenly, thus leaving time in all day parts to sell to other advertisers. The trouble is, it dilutes the effectiveness of they buy for the advertiser. Media professionals have information that shows audience levels throughout the day and can balance the buy to maximize the fluctuation.

6. RESIST THE $300 PRIME SPOT PITCH.
Too many smart business people get lured by the promise of a prime spot for a fraction of its regular price. Smetimes you can get a cheap prime spot. But, it’s almost always at the expense of the overall efficiency of the buy. Sometimes when you pay a small amount for a bank of commercials that are allowed to rotate throughout the day at the station’s discretion, you can get lucky. But, by the time you add up what you paid and measure it against what you got, it is a very bad gamble. Even if you landed a cheap spot in a prime time television slot, you can bet the rest of your schedule ran in garbage times because that’s where stations have most of their inventory.

7. HOW DO YOU KNOW YOU GOT WHAT YOU PAID FOR?
After a schedule runs, how do you know if it delivered the audience that was promised? Even if a business owner is sophisticated enough to know how to buy programming based upon audience levels, he rarely follows through with the station to measure whether the program actually delivered. Most don’t know that if a TV station delivers less than 90% of the promised audience during a campaign, they have to make up the difference. An independent media buyer will use her own rating information to analyze the buy after it has run to make sure the advertiser got everything he paid for.

Sometimes just finding that two of our clients have similar needs is the genesis for a marketing advantage. Take California Closets & West Side Electric. They both wanted to use television and both wanted to reach essentially the same target audience. So, we produced a 15 second ad for each of them & married the ads into a 30-second ad. California Closets buys a schedule on one of the network stations and West Side Electric buys a schedule of about equal value on a series of cable shows that deal with design, remodeling, upgrading houses, etc. In both cases each of our clients has a schedule of 15-second ads running back to back with the other. The cost is less than buying 15’s by themselves and both clients are happy.

We have, in the past, traded space on the back of a direct mail piece for media time. The media gets to have print exposure and our client receives media at no cash cost. Again, both of them are happy.

These are both low tech solutions to client problem/opportunities. It doesn’t have to be complicated to be effective. Sometimes we produce very edgy stuff…but only when it is called for.