The Rate Card
The last thing you need to have a basic understanding of before we move on to the ad reservation process is the rate card. It can be very intimidating and is one of the most confusing parts of newspaper advertising, both for the new salesperson and the account. First of all, the name is misleading, because its size is much bigger than a card, and there's a lot more than rates in it. If you can figure it out, it will tell you almost everything you'll need to know about rates, deadlines, ad sizes, legal liability-just about everything.

The problem is, rate cards aren't as clear as they could be. In fact, I know some newspapers who intentionally keep the rate card confusing so an ad rep has to be there with the potential advertiser to better help them, or in more accurate terms, better sell them. All rate cards have a number of things in common.

First, there's the rates. As we discussed in the ad layout portion of this program, most ads are measured in column widths across and inches in depth. When a customer asks you "what's your rate", they're usually asking for the cost of a unit of advertising, that is, what a box one column wide and one inch deep costs. This one column by one inch ad size is usually called a column inch. The rate card will contain a price for a column inch, from which all other ad sizes can be calculated. This basic rate is called the "open" rate. This rate is the rate charged to advertisers that are not eligible for a discount. We'll get into discounts in a moment, but for now, let's talk about how to calculate an ad size based on the basic or "open" rate.

For example, imagine that you've been given an ad that measures 2 columns wide by 6 inches deep ad. For shorthand, most newspapers call that a 2x6 in the U.S. (a 6x2 in the U.K.),columns always coming first and inches second. If the rate card says that the "open" per column inch rate in the newspaper is $50, here's how to calculate it. First, you'll need to know how many of those one column by one inch units are in the 2x6. You do this by multiplying the columns and inches together. So a 2 column by 6 inch ad would be a 12 column-inch ad. Similarly, a 3 column x 5 inch ad would be considered a 15 column-inch ad, a 5x16 would be an 80 column- inch ad, and so on.

Once you know what the total column inches of an ad is, then you simply multiply it by the column inch rate found in your rate card. So, back to the 2x6, or 12 column- inch ad, you'd multiply the 12 by the rate. If the rate was $50 per column inch, then the cost of the ad would be 12 times $50 or $600. By the way, a 3 col x 4 inch ad would also equal 12 column-inches and would cost the same as a 2x6. So this is simple enough. We need to multiply the width in columns by the depth in inches, and then multiply that by the column-inch rate and you've got your total ad cost.

So what makes rate cards so complex and confusing? Well, newspapers like to encourage advertisers to run more than once and so the newspapers offer discounts when an advertiser agrees to run more frequently. That's why newspapers offer all sorts of discounts off that original, or "open" rate. And this is where it gets a bit complicated. These discounts fall into two categories--volume and frequency which we'll talk about next.