[PW] Re: Locating Newspaper Advertisements

[JoAnne Schmitz]

On Sat, 20 May 2006 12:11:46 -0400, you ("Franco, Adrienne"
<AFranco at iona.edu>) wrote:

>A few days ago, I had an interesting question at the desk.  A patron was trying to locate specific advertisements for an academic institution which ran in the New York Times, local paper, and Wall Street Journal.  They wanted to know which specific dates the ad ran in each paper. Patron was told by the institution that the ads began running in these and some other papers in mid-April of this year.  Other than searching each daily issue of the paper, what other strategy/ies would you recommend?
> 
>I made the following suggestions:
>
>-- go back to academic institution and see if the office which pays bills (or office which would have received bill such as possibly admissions office) would have on file an invoice from the paper(s) including an itemized list of when their ad ran.
>-- contact the advertising dept. of the paper(s) themselves and ask if they could provide specific dates.

The magic word is "tearsheet."  This is a sheet from the publication with
the ad on it, sent to the advertiser to prove it was published.  The
tearsheet includes identifying information about the publication and date.
Often this is sent automatically, and the institution may have a collection
of all of these.  Even if they won't give your patron copies, they may be
willing to give him the information about the ads, because that's on the
tearsheet.

Second best would be for the patron to call the individual publications.
The advertising department may or may not be able to help.  Some don't keep
close track of the ad once they've sold it.

Who does?  The patron may wish to ask to speak to the pagination
department.  These are the people who actually put the paper together.
They may be willing to look it up for the patron.  

If not, and it's a repeat ad, they may actually remember it and where it
would be found generally, such as in the B section, on Fridays, something
like that.

>I don't believe advertisements are generally indexed anywhere, so I don't know if any strategies other than manually searching papers day by day or the two suggestions above would be successful.

Most publications do have these very well indexed internally -- something
from April of this year is probably not hard to find at all if you're an
employee of the publicaton.  Getting access to that information from
outside is another story.

-j

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