Cracked Cauldron Spillings

Yup. Advertising, paid for straight out advertising, as opposed to marketing, which can be mostly free or goodwill.

Yesterday, Maanger was supposed to meet with the advertising director of a newspaper, a weekly for the wealthy. When she arrived at his place of business, it was locked up. No one answered the phone when she called, and as of a few minutes ago, she hasn't received a return call on what happened.

I suppose they have enough ad revenue to not worry about losing a client?

We have enough other options that losing out on one won't make a significant difference.

The other places where we plan to place ads are quite cooperative.

This weekend, we'll revamp and redirect our press release, and send it to a variety of newspapers and radio stations, and a local magazine.

In doing some investigative work, apparently most personal chefs operate almost entirely by word of mouth, slowly building a clientele. We scoured all the local papers and none had ads for personal chefs, even though we know now there are at least a dozen personal chefs working in the area.

We know about the personal chefs simply because Manager joined a Personal Chef network, and because we searched pretty hard for them.

This won't do for us.

We will be placing 1/10th page ads in several of the weeklies that cater to the local population that would be most likely to want a personal chef. In addition, we're sending press releases to the Food Section of the 4 major dailies in town, and the Business Paper. The business paper, we've been waffling on advertising in initially. True, it does target the people we want to target - busy executives who want home cooked meals - but the advertising price is a touch high.

The plan there is to see if they will print the press release, and if it generates interest, then we'll place ads. Of course, the press release may generate enough interest to give us a discount in advertising at first, and we'll certainly take advantage of that.

Tomorrow, we have to look for a different vehicle for Manager. Her Thunderbird will cost more to repair into a working condition than buying a good used car will cost. And it's essential she have a working car. There's a used car dealership that advertises "real swell cars", and Manager knows someone who's bought 2 cars there. And there's the place where her brother bought his truck. And a few other places. Ideally, if she can find a used Hyundai Elantra stationwagon, that should be within her price range and size needed. But anything she can afford and is large enough will do, because frankly, anything that gets better than 4 miles to the gallon and doesn't overheat when the car is driven faster than 35 miles an hour will do.

And, we'll be posting pics later of assorted holiday foods.