When Good Ads Go Bad Introduction What's adjustment worthy? Worst case scenarios Who decides? Take our ad effectiveness course. Learn what you need to know to get a great response the first time you run. Just $59 • Get more readers seeing your ad • Get more readers reading your ad • Get more readers responding

If your advertising representative is any good, you'll get a call about a mistake in your ad before you even see it. When an ad does appear incorrectly in a newspaper by no fault of your own, sometimes you're due a credit or an adjustment.

If and how much is up to the newspaper, and the better ones are pretty fair. Whatever the situation, it helps to understand the newspaper's point of view before approaching them for a credit or adjustment.

Newspapers prefer to make up for an error on their part by rerunning the ad in an upcoming issue at no charge, or at a discounted cost. Understandably, they do not like to return revenue to a customer in the form of a credit to their bill.

The reasoning behind this is that rerunning the ad correctly is much cheaper for the newspaper than refunding any of the money paid for the original ad.

In the case of a $500 ad, for example, the newspaper could either return the advertiser's $500 or run the ad again correctly, which might cost the newspaper perhaps only $200 in paper and ink. The newspaper just saved themselves $300.

Of course, the ad has to have a pretty major error in it for a newspaper to rerun it at no charge. Some errors are so small that a newspaper might agree to run the corrected ad again at a discounted cost or, worst case, offer nothing at all.

Next: What's adjustment worthy?

Conditions of Use     © 2001-2010 Robert McInnis Consulting