(Circulation Management) Some people believe that anything worth doing is worth doing badly. And judging by the stories heard this week at the Folio: conference, that view is shared by many who work in magazine circulation.
Take Fran Kane, who started a new job at Town & Country magazine several years ago just in time to send a 5 million-piece mailing. The problem, as Kane found out, was that the outer envelope featured the name Town & County.
“I now know how to spell county and country,” said Kane.
But that was only the first of many career disasters for Kane. Another occurred when oversized envelopes being sent in a 9.4 million-piece mailing for Sassy fell apart in the mail thanks to the incompetence of the vendor. She spent three months touring postal facilities to sort it out.
And Kane still suffers the occasional mishap as vice president of circulation at Archeology. For example, when readers, who tend to be to people aged 55 and up, called a misprinted toll-free number, they ended up on a porno line.
“It’s quite embarrassing to know I might be responsible for many heart attacks out there,” Kane said.
Then there’s John Rockwell, who now is now a vice president at Paperloop Inc., despite earlier blunders. He once sent a postcard for Metal Works News, reducing the base price from $99 to $66. The postcard put it this way: “Save 66%.”
“BPA and ABC never noticed,” he laughed.
Even worse was a catastrophe he heard of but didn’t have anything to do with.
It seemed that some agency hot-shots inserted some dummy copy in test samples for a mailing by British Telecom to its high-end customers.
But they forgot that they did it, and as a result, the salutation said: “Dear Rich Bastard.” It went to 10 million people.
Rockwell guessed that “several people at this agency are no longer in advertising.”
And editors are hardly immune. Moderator Mary McEvoy, president of M.C. McEvoy & Associates, recalled the time that Ms. magazine misspelled the word “feminism” on its own cover. McEvoy and company found out about it when they read about it on the New York Post’s Page Six.
The lesson for McEvoy? “Love your proofreaders. Check every promotional piece, and every piece of copy. Don’t let it go.”
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