Tips, tricks and advice for advertising management and print production.
Jennifer | 3:38 pm | January 21, 2008 | budgets, ads, prepress, process, workflow, planning, plan, General
All of your electronic artwork - support files, final ads, standards manuals, etc…. Are digital assets. It can be difficult to keep your files organised and even more difficult to ensure your suppliers and clients have access to them. There are online sites that make this simpler.
If you need to have offsite backup (that is, you need your files to survive your office burning down) you can use simple storage facilities such as X-drive. If you want a more robust solution that allow not just file management, but full search facilities and the ability to have clients work off your files, there are wide-ranging sites such as Corbis’ Media Management service, which supplies the option of fully automatic file storage, archiving and retrieval.
Guess which service is more expensive.
There are a number of solutions available to you. As always, they’re only worth as much as you’re willing to work with them. It’s still up to you to ensure everything is kept up to date and proper search terms (if applicable) are generated for each shot. If your supplier is going to allow clients to customize art based on templates you’ve uploaded, test those applications over and over. Find the least tech-savvy person you know and have them go through the steps. You need to be sure it’ll work for everyone. Otherwise it’ll end up being an exercise in frustration for you and your clients.
Jennifer | 10:23 pm | September 17, 2007 | magazine, ads, prepress, newspaper, budgets, money, workflow, planning
Yes, running ads in print media is expensive. Your media rep will tell you that repetition is the key in print advertising and that adds up fast. So how do you find the money for producing the ad?
As always, a little preparation goes a long way. There is nothing more expensive than last minute ad creation. You’ll end up with lousy creative, which wastes all those advertising dollars. If you know you’ll be running in magazines and newspapers, you should be planning your media and production months in advance (for newsprint, get going on the production 4-6 weeks ahead of the first ad insertion).
One of the best ways to save money on the production end is by purchasing ads of similar sizes across your publications. Not only does this help solidify your brand look, it means less ad sizes need to be designed and produced. This can save you a lot of money.
Another money saver relates to ad sizes. If you get ad sizes that are similar you can “float” the ad. If your first ad size is 5″ x 7″ and your next size is 4.75″ x 6.5″, you simply build the smaller size ad, and let the ad “float” in the larger area. This is commonly done in newspaper advertising, where no bleeds are involved.
If you have an image you want to use in your ads, make sure you plan how and where you will use it, then send mechanicals for all publications along with the image to your service bureau or designer. This way any scanning is done once and the prepress supplier can build multiple files all at once, bringing down your prepress costs.