celfyddwr.com

Amazon has customer service right. As opposed to the money-grubbing sales people at my work, Amazon would rather do the customer right, even if it means losing a few pennies here and there (they’re so big that I doubt they’ll miss the $10 from my order).

The other day I purchased some music from their MP3 store. For some reason my payment got declined, but since you download the music immediately, there wasn’t much they could do. I was willing to re-purchase the music, if that’s what I needed to do. A few days after I contacted customer service and got a vague reply, I got a more informed reply that said the payment method was fixed, but they couldn’t re-try my credit card since the order was already completed. Not only did they say I could keep the 6 tracks for free, they also *gave my account a credit* for 4 songs (which they claimed was for the price of all the music I bought, but it’s free, so who am I to complain?).

So, to recap. Not only did I not have to purchase the music again for $6, they also gave me $4 free towards more songs. How cool is that?

Oh, and if you haven’t tried buying music from Amazon, do it. It’s so much better than iTunes. You get better quality MP3s, and _no_ DRM. As far as I can tell, they have everything that iTunes does.

These are just some of my own frustrations as an ad builder at a newspaper.

# Don’t let your customer put too much text into the ad, unless absolutely necessary. I really doubt people care that a car has a tilt wheel or AM/FM radio. Those things are pretty standard these days. Too much text creates a couple problems: the ad looks cluttered and when put on a page with editorial content and other ads, it gets lost and looks like a gray mass; and the text gets so small that people would need to use a magnifying glass to read it all. People reading the paper at their leisure won’t do that. They’ll just skip right over the ad.
# If everything is in a burst, then nothing stands out. The point of advertising is to catch people’s attention. Pick one or two things that will really grab the reader and entices them to check out more of what the client is selling.
# An ad isn’t a catalog. Don’t try to fit 24 house in the space of a quarter-page, and don’t try to list every kind of wine or camera you sell. Again, pick a few things to focus on and make the readers want to visit your store or website to find out what else you carry. In today’s age of Pop-Tarts taking too long to cook, people aren’t going to be reading the paper for endless hours, reading every last ad. You need to stand out.
# Make sure any images you send to put in the ad are of print-quality. Images should be around 150-200 dpi(dots per inch) _minimum_. If you’re unsure how to check that, make sure your images are at least twice the size as you want them to appear in print. If you’re still unsure, as your friendly neighborhood ad builder, and then follow their advice–don’t just look like a deer in headlights and get frustrated.
# _Be on time._ Deadlines are there for a purpose. They help get the ads in and done in a timely manner so that you can get a proof and make sure everything’s cool with the ad before it prints. If you bring in a full-page ad at 16:30, you’re rushing the ad builder and mistakes will be made. And you’ll only get more frustrated when you can’t get a proof in 15 minutes to show the customer who’s leaving for vacation for a week. It’s really unfair to be bringing late ads in forcing us to put ads that came in on time aside so we can deal with your crisis.
# Your job isn’t the most important one at the paper. So step off your high horse. Sure, you sell the ads, but if there was no one to build them, what would you do? If there was no one to make sure camera-ready ads are okay to print, what would you do? Sure, you get salary _and_ commission, but pay scale doesn’t necessarily equate to value.
# We’re an ad-building department. There’s another department called _Creative_ that you should bring your ads to if you need something, say, creative done with them. If you don’t have a layout it’s best not to have us guess at what your customer might want so that we have to revise/rebuild the ad 5 times. Do a layout, or bring your ads to creative.

And there you have it. A list of my frustrations at work–or at least the ones I could think of while typing this up. I’ll probably post about more later.