Marketing and Advertising Manager

So welcome to the best and most exciting position on the Activate team! This position involves you being friendly, open to criticism and other ideas, innovative, super organised, have access to resources and good at apologising as well as kissing some butt!!! This is not a position where you will need journalistic skills, but you will need to know what is potting behind the media scene. Don’t panic, you’ll learn all of this as you go along! I carried a file with me all the time that had the rate card, contract and paper deadlines, almost every where with me in case of a potential advertiser! So now for the nitty gritty stuff!

Duties:

It is your job to uphold the image of the paper! You love the paper, you love the paper, you love the paper. You will defend it when people are mean and you will be there for it when times are tough! You and your team are the face of the paper never forget that!

You will be expected to know the background of the paper, so that you can easily promote the papers image and inform advertisers of their market. You will also need to know about all the procedures of the SRC, i.e stamps on posters and how payment works! Don’t be afraid to bugger up, I had no help and found my way around pretty easily. You must liaise with your financial manager, office manager and Megan in the SRC accounts office. At the end of the day although there is a financial manager you are the one who knows where, when and how the money is coming in and mostly going out. You must keep records of payments as well as invoices etc.

It is important to keep up good relationships with your advertisers! They are the client and they are always right. Smile even if you want to smash someone’s face in. Grahamstown is small and if you piss someone off the news will get around and then the proverbial poo will hit the fan in an uncontrollable way. If there is a problem you apologise profusely and do everything in your power to make it right!

You are the one who makes the cash for the paper, gets freebies, organises events, makes sure advertisers pay as well as designing adverts and making them look good in our so hot right now paper. You need to continuously get new advertisers and try and land some permanent advertisers. As far as marketing goes, you need to make people aware that Activate is the greatest student paper that was ever printed! You and your team will do distribution as well as advertising every new edition that graces Rhodes University. Basically you have to increase the readership so that every single student on campus is reading, talking and sleeping Activate every 2 weeks.