Rather media buying in a tough economy … is a pain in the butt. Especially when you are just a little school newspaper in which people doubt that any reads your little school newspaper. I know they told me to expect this, but we are scrapping around to ANY business that will advertise with us. So we call about 5-10 companies a day, trying to find anywhere that will advertise with us.
Oddly enough right now, I have about 6 accounts … the most so far, even though I have all the tiny, little accounts. It makes me wonder about everyone else. What are they doing? But then again, they have better contracts than me.
The big crisis of the week is that we need to sell student valentines in the newspaper by TODAY and while we need about 20, we only have 1. They’re only 3 or 5 dollars, but while people are interested, no one seems to have money on them. It’s depressing as heck … seriously, if other students don’t sign up, we on the newspaper staff will have to. And do I want to shell out 20 dollars to buy valentines for people that I barely know? NO. But if we need to fill the space, that’s what I’m probably going to end up doing. We also need to fill the “Places to Go” part of the newspaper … but that is just going to be tiny and sad. Nothing we can do about it, the deadline’s passed. This is not turning out to be a good semester. But our adviser, Prof. Hendrick, reminds us that every problem is actually an opportunity. We’ll see if we’ll be able to turn this problem into an opportunity. We have a whole semester in front of us.
On another note, I messed up yesterday (oops!). I made this mistake with an account … I accidentally gave a half-rate instead of a half-price. So I got in a little bit of trouble. Didn’t get yelled at though since I had to run out and grab a check and a contract from another client at the same time. Thankfully Pat, our finance manager, didn’t realize that I was going to grab a check so she was happy when I came back. Remind me to never do that again … Pat can be so scary when she’s scolding … I’d hate to see her actually angry.
But a little bit of good news: YAY! We have a new member to the staff! So far, there are only 8 of us peons (aka. account managers) … 1/3 of the amount that there was last year. Last week Bryan left the staff due to personal reasons and yesterday Ryan came and signed up. Weird how that works out huh?
In other news, I volunteered to be team leader for my ADV 128 Campaign – yay for me. I have to find out if we can switch the product we’re doing right now to Northface. Why we decided to choose Lipitor in the first place, I have no idea. Hopefully we can get this down so that we can start the project. I really hope that we can do well, especially since this is the first time I’ve been in charge of a major project. Time will tell. Then I’ll know, and then I’ll tell you. Hopefully I’ll do well so that future HR for future jobs will look at my resume and think … “hm, I guess she’s ok” and hire me.
Also, my professor, Prof. Hendrick, keeps on talking about the bill that might make advertising a non-tax deductible entity. Quite honestly, it is a depressing thought. We’re all going to pray that Obama and his administration doesn’t do anything like this since 1) our professional lives depend on it and 2) consumer products, even business products, depend advertising to get messages out to the public. Could you imagine APSCA paying for their ads? I doubt they would still be able to promote their organization if they were forced to pay the amount of money that a business needs to advertise. Don’t make me even go into the topic of small business. Sad sad. On a personal note, cable bills would go up! Sad, but true since advertising pays for a lot of the costs that go into my and your fav. shows.
Well on that depressing note … what the heck! No, I will not end on a sad note. People, read paragraph 5 again and end on that. Because that is the best news I had for yesterday. I’ll find more fun things today with all hope. Til tomorrow …
