Marketing, Advertising, and… Poetry

(Sunday Poetry Corner) These days, I’ve been sharing my knowledge and experiences in the field of advertising. But today is Sunday, a sacred day we dedicate to the spirit. And to nourish it, what better than poetry? This raises a question: can poetry and advertising coexist?

Believe it or not, I once pondered this myself. I am a poet—I always have been, for a poet is born, not made—and yet I worked in advertising. To top it off, advertising is a cog in the marketing machine, tied to prior research, budgeting, cost control, and more.
 
So, as you can see, poetry still finds a way to peek through, every now and then, amid all those numbers…
 
ADVERTISING AND NUMBERS 
 
I dream up selling ideas,
write advertisements,
jot down their instructions,
envision images, structures,
and sketch them in a draft.
A flood of ideas,
sprung from my mind,
swamps my desk, fills my files,
overflows drawers,
spills into the hallway.
Ideas, projects, phrases, concepts,
for the world must be stirred,
motion must be sparked.
But also… I must crunch numbers. 
 
Seated, I compute figures,
calculate percentages;
it’s a thread stitched into my craft.
The highs and lows of life
seep in, day by day,
onto my work desk. 
 
And if I can’t escape them,
if I must bear their weight,
like a toll I pay
for the joy of creating
and writing what I imagine,
at least let me shrink them
to their barest form. 
 
Numbers, cursed numbers,
let me soar more freely,
let my pencil draw its strokes
as it pleases,
crafting, if it wills,
verses and poems,
long or short.
 

A chance encounter will take him far away, on a thrilling adventure full of action and emotion that will change his life... but also the lives of everyone around him…
“Fleeing into silence”: https://a.co/d/7SUfVb3

How an Advertising Manager can save money

On this occasion, I’m going to share a decision I made to save money when producing advertising brochures: Making it absolutely clear that the ownership of the brochures belongs to the company that paid the creatives (whether freelancers or an advertising agency) and the printers. Because what happens in almost every company? 

The company commissions an external designer or an agency to design a brochure… and pays them for it. Then, it hires a printer or the same agency that designed it to print the brochure… and pays for that too. After some time, the company needs more copies of the brochure, requiring a reprint. And what happens then? They ask the agency or the printer that handled it the first time to do the reprint. In doing so, the ownership of that brochure has effectively been left in the hands of the agency or the printer, and the company—if it wants a reprint later—has to go back to them for it, without the chance to request quotes from other printers. Perhaps, if they sought quotes from other printers for this second round, they’d find the reprint would be cheaper, but they can’t because they don’t have the necessary printing plates (photoliths) for the reprint—the original printer kept them after the first job. 

Therefore, it’s essential to make it clear to agencies and printers that, once they’ve been chosen to produce those brochures and the job is complete, they must hand over the printing plates to the company. If a reprint is needed later, it’s logical to request a quote from them, but not only from them. Isn’t it standard practice to always get three quotes for comparison? So why isn’t this done for reprints? Simply because the commissioning company hasn’t demanded that the printing plates be handed over once the job is finished. 

This way, every time we needed a new reprint, we requested quotes from three printers, and the job went to the one offering the lowest price on that occasion. 

And there’s even another advantage. Often, when deciding to create a new brochure, we reuse the cover, interior, or a specific page from a previous one. In this case, the designer or agency only needs to create the artwork for the new pages, because we already have the final artwork and printing plates for the repeated sections. We can then pass these along to the printer handling the new job. 

Of course, it’s more convenient for the Advertising Manager to have a single point of contact (the advertising agency) that takes care of everything, with the manager simply giving approvals along the way… but this is more expensive than if the Advertising Manager takes charge and oversees every step. 

And this doesn’t mean doing away with advertising agencies—do you know why? 
Because the savings achieved with this approach aren’t just “saved” money—they’re funds that can be reinvested into more advertising. And part of that money will end up back with the advertising agencies for other campaigns.

A journey through the history of the pharmaceutical industry and one of its great laboratories that had its origins in Alfred Nobel...
“From Alfred Nobel to AstraZeneca”: https://a.co/d/9svRTuI