Advertising Selling - I used to sell advertising space and it’s not something I would hurry back to. It wasn’t arduous but I found it relentlessly repetitive and boring. Once you’ve sold one advert, you’ve sold them all. It’s a grind, only broken by walks to the coffee machine and a hurried sandwich at lunchtime. The most difficult thing about advertising selling was trying to motivate myself on a Monday morning. The Boomtown Rats made that record for me. Then Friday afternoon would come and it was hard to stay awake. We all dashed out of the office when the shift ended like a bunch of school kids allowed out to play.
The type of advertisement I dealt with was hotels and holiday accommodation. Some of this was for huge hotel corporations and some was for one owner bed and breakfast set ups. I preferred to deal with the private owners of small establishments than with the big hotels. They were very proud of their businesses and had a personal stake in them. Advertising selling is a lot more bearable if you actually make someone happy, and I built up a good relationship with some of the owners who liked to renew their adverts every year.
The job description I had involved a combination of finding new business and trying to persuade existing clients to renew. There was a sales target attached to each and all the advertising selling team were under a lot of pressure. I specialized in holiday accommodation which offered facilities for the disabled. This could get very complicated because descriptions had to be precise. A small bed and breakfast may have grab rails in the bathrooms and so on but not the facilities to cater for someone who was wheelchair bound. Some would take wheelchair users only if their carer came too. The distance from the accommodation to the local amenities had to be described accurately.
Descriptions in general could be a bit of a nightmare. Occasionally an owner or manager would exaggerate their facilities or mislead us in some way. The trouble was, if a holiday maker complained that something did not match the advertisement copy, it was us that were held responsible. Our advertising selling company was held to account because we were responsible for the accuracy of the content.
I usually rang fifty or so potential clients each day and I had a database containing four hundred existing clients. I would have loved the company to pay me to visit each and every establishment on the books, but they never were inclined to. It was impractical to get independent endorsements for them, I would have been doing it all day. So, we were expected to check, but we didn’t and it got us into trouble sometimes. Advertising selling is behind me now and I don’t miss it!
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