Why ad placement is important, even to small businesses

Every single day I begin to realize more and more things that make businesses a success and also things that make them fail. For those of you who read the paper version of the Sheboygan Press, you may have noticed this article in yesterdays paper. When I was browsing though it (mainly looking at ads) I came across an article that was about a rather large cocaine bust that happened in the Sheboygan area. The Article started on the main page and continued on the last page of section A in the Sheboygan Press. The people that were arrested with posession of the cocaine were family members of the Sheboygan based restaurant El Camino. Go figure the article published right next to a very large eye catching ad for the restaurant. Which leads me to my point of how important your ad placement is no matter what size business you have.

If you are just throwing money into your local newspaper, billboards, radio and tv, at least know when your ads are running, where they are running and what they are saying. This could be a PR Nightmare for a large company, which is why they hire full time marketing and PR people to manage content and know when and where it is running. In this case you have a great local mexican restaurant that just placed their ad on the same page that associated their business with one of the largest cocaine busts in county history. Not so great.

This leads me back to my point that business don’t fail because of the economy that we are in they fail because business owners don’t have a good grasp on the task at hand. “We are to busy to manage that” or “We don’t’ have time for that” is the start of a failing business. Even the little things like making sure your ad doesn’t run next to an article that associates your business with a large drug bust. You may have changed the perception of thousands of readers from a great restaurant to a place they may never step foot in again. It is just to bad that their account executive at the Sheboygan Press did not catch this!

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