C'mon, Man!

I have to go on a little rant here. I'm feeling a little like Keyshawn Johnson talking about Matt Leinart here.

In case you haven't heard, the newspaper industry is facing some tough times. This past week, we placed some newspaper ads for a client in 5 newspapers in the midwest ... cities like Wichita, KC, and St. Louis to name a few. As this is not an area we have done ads for before, we needed to fill out credit apps with all of the papers. Do you know that of the 5 newspaper credit app forms I filled out, 4 of them didn't provide me with a fax number?

Can you imagine the sheer stupidity? It is almost a joke. Here it is, they are making me fill out this form like I'm buying a house with personal guarantees and all other kinds of crap that makes me stop and think already. Then, to make me have to make a phone call or surf your website to find your fax number because you weren't considerate enough to put it on the form for me? Why don't you try to make it a little harder to do business with you? I'm already steering many clients away from you because the data shows you're not as effective as online marketing or television for many demographics and product types. Your readership is in the toilet, the ad dollars are voting with their feet, and you're on the outside looking in. And, yet, I have a client who loves newspapers, so there I am placing ads ... and you're making it hard for me. Brilliant!

Where's the tiniest little investment in IT to make the credit stuff a self-serve deal for your clients? We provide a few pieces of information, and you get all of the rest of the information you need from my credit report and my company's credit report? Why make me manually fill out a form? If I have to provide any info, why not let me type the info into a form instead of trying to write neatly on the tiny lines of a form that should be 3 pages long but is crammed onto a single page? And, how about a little investment in your office supplies? You're a multi-million dollar business and you are faxing me a credit app that literally looks like it has been photocopied about 100 times and you're still faxing it out - more gray than white, a coffee stain at the bottom, the old logo from before the merger, etc.

As they say on ESPN's football pre-game, "C'mon, man!"