The Marketing Muses occasionally receive calls asking why some of our deadlines are set so far in advance of publication dates. To help answer this question, let’s look at the steps involved in producing our EWM Mailers starting from the deadline you’ve been given to submit your ads.
— We need a couple of days to review the ads while they’re still in the system and give you a chance to solve any problems we’ve identified.
— Then we need a week to download the ads from the system, get your ad copy and photos looking spiffy, pull together all the various elements of the Mailer, proof everything, and finally burn a CD to give to the printer.
— The printer needs another week to prepare and submit his proofs, print the mailers, cut and fold them and ship them to our mailing house.
— The mailing house needs a little less than a week to address the Mailers and get them to the post office.
— The post office needs up to 5 days to deliver the Mailers.
If you plot that all out on a calendar, you’ll see that when we set the Mailer deadline about a month before the publication date, there’s not a lot of cushion built in. Some publications, like Ocean Drive and Christie’s, set their deadlines nearly 2 months in advance. They’re dealing with the same time consuming production steps we are.
The industry calls deadlines that are firm or have already been extended to the max “Drop Dead Deadlines.”
So if you were to call the Muses about any given publication and say, “Gosh, the due date seems awfully early. Are you sure that’s the deadline?” and the Muses were to respond, “Drop dead!” you’ll understand that we mean absolutely no disrespect at all. Really.
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