Shipments are next entered on the stock sheets, while the original orders are filed in a binder, alphabetically by dealers names. Reference to this file shows exactly what advertising matter has been sent each dealer.
PERIODICAL ADVERTISING
When the question of periodical advertising is taken up, the most important of all publicity fields is entered. From the country weekly, through the entire list of city dailies, scientific and literary weeklies and monthlies, popular magazines, class magazines, and trade papers for every vocation, religious papers, and reviews, periodicals can be selected which will reach any class or cover any territory. With the thousands of publications to select from, the advertising manager needs to know which ones will best reach the people he wants to reach; what papers have the largest circulations; which are most popular among a given class or in a certain territory. He must be posted on rates and discounts, that he may cover his territory economically. And added to this, he must have a perfect checking system, that he may know to a certainty what returns each and every publication is bringing him. Such a system may show him, for example, that the magazine with a circulation of a million and an advertising rate of $5.00 a line, brings orders at a less cost than another in which he is paying but $2.00 a line—or vice versâ. Perhaps the cost in both is within the amount he is prepared to pay, but he must know what it costs, that he may know where to increase and where to curtail the appropriations.
Rate Cards. Supposing the business to have been just started, or one that has done no advertising—and this is the most satisfactory premise from which to work, in laying out a general system for the department—among the first duties of the advertising manager will be to secure information about mediums, and the chief source of information will be the publications themselves, as they will respond promptly to requests for rate cards.
If the advertising manager gets rate cards from a hundred publications, he will find probably forty or fifty different shapes, sizes, and styles. Several spasmodic attempts have been made to induce publishers to adopt a uniform size for rate cards, with but little success. In the effort to produce something striking, the convenience of the advertiser is very likely to be overlooked. One publisher will use a 3"×5" card—the most convenient size; another, in order to better display the artistic ideas of his own copy department, uses a card 6"×9"; a book of rules is issued by another; the result is a miscellaneous collection that does not fit any size of file made.
To insure uniformity in their files, advertising agencies have been obliged to design rate sheets or cards which they send to the publisher to be filled in. Some large advertisers now follow the same plan, requesting publishers to enter rates on special forms.
But whether or not he uses a special form, every advertiser should have his own file of rate cards—even if the information is written on a blank card. The special information needed is shown in Fig. 12. This can be on a card, or if preferred, a sheet to be filed in a loose-lea binder can be used. The cards or sheets should be indexed alphabetically, under the names of the publications.
Fig. 12. Index Card for a Record of Advertising Rates