Booking Advertising
We are happy to plan your advertising campaign and book the necessary media space, but some clients prefer to organise the booking themselves, and then ask us to supply the artwork direct to the publication. We’ve devised a checklist of questions to fill out when booking your space – this should give us all the information we need to make sure that your ad conforms to spec and prints properly.
Please download the Advertisement Booking Form, and either fax or scan/email it back to us with your instructions.
A few notes:
Size
Many magazines are A4 or approximately A4 – but their gutters and margins may vary, meaning that one publication’s “half-page ad” can be a slightly different shape to another’s.
Newspapers sell space by the column centimetre, so an ad which is 2 columns wide by 7 centimetres high is known as a “7 double”. However, column widths vary enormously – and depend on size of page and number of columns that the page is divided into.
Please make sure that for all bookings you are given the actual width and height of your ad in millimetres, as well as the general term (“quarter page” etc) for the space.
Sometimes different sections of a news paper use different amounts of columns – eg recruitment ad sections tend to have more columns than editorial – so it’s important to tell the booking agent where in the paper you are advertising.
Font Copyright
Publications will generally only accept files with embedded fonts. This is partly because fonts are the biggest cause of file problems, but mainly because fonts are copyright
and should not be sent to a 3rd party.
File Formats and Supply
Most ads are sent via email as high res PDF these days. These are made to a higher resolution than PDFs sent for proofing or used as web downloads. Often a publication will
have a specification for us to distill to, but we will supply a standard “Press quality” pdf if no spec is supplied.
Alternatively we can supply a vector .eps file with outlined fonts, made through Adobe Illustrator. These files tend to be a lot larger than pdfs, so are not always suitable for emailing.
Bitmap files – eg JPG or TFFs – should not be used for ads. Even at high resolution these file formats are not suitable for type, and will result in a soft or jagged appearance.