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4. Good places to order from include NEDesign and QRST's. NEDesign is usually cheaper, but a little less reliable. QRST's has been known to give discounts if you may them in cash.
Postcards
1. This will use up the bulk of the publicity budget
2. Vistaprint or overnightprints are usually good options. Choose between them based on who has the best discounts at the moment. Hint for vistaprint: you can often get a better deal on vertical orientation postcards by rotating the image instead of the postcard.
3. If you google "cheap custom postcards" or "custom postcards free" or "custom postcards discount", you'll get the magic discount version of postcard websites that aren't necessarily available if you just go straight to their URL.
4. I usually get 1000 postcards. the next increment down from that is 500, and i find that i can usually get rid of at least 800, which means it's worth getting the larger amount. but if they're not discounted that semester, then just go with 500.
5. When postcards arrive, give at least 10 to each actor, if not more. Tell them to give them to friends. drop them around campus, in athena clusters, next to stacks of the tech. also keep a lot of them in booth and spread them out so people grab them. try to get rid of as many as possible!
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Tech Ad
ASA groups get a halfpage of ad space free in the tech per semester (i.e. a full page per year). It is wise to split this up in 2: use 2 quarterpage ads per show (one for the fall, one for the spring). Check their website for specs for a quarterpage ad. email their ads department ahead of time warning them that we would like to do this. pick 2 good days (i generally pick the 2 fridays of the show) to advertise on, and tell them to run it once on each of those days. oh yeah and it's black and white.
This should be good, however, I just want to explain one detail to prevent any misunderstanding in the future. The Tech gives ASA student groups 80 free column-inches of space (equivalent to one full page ad) each academic year, and your group has already used 40 of your free column-inches of space with two 4x5 ads last October. Thus, you have 40 free column-inches, or one half page of space, remaining for this year, as you correctly stated. However, if you look on our website, you'll see that what we call a quarter page ad is actually either a 3x8 or a 4x6 ad, both of which would be 24 column-inches. If you would run two ads at this size, you would end up running 8 column-inches over your free space, and would be charged $7.50 per column-inch for that overrun.