Member-only story
Even doing things right couldn’t save them
Doing the right thing is necessary. It’s not sufficient.
From 1995 to 2000, I worked in the Advertising and Marketing departments at the Boston Globe. For most of that time, I was working full-time hours while earning my Bachelor’s degree.
When I first started working at the Globe, I was doing training on a software program called AdFast, where frequent classified advertising clients such as real estate agents and car dealers could transmit their ad copy electronically instead of over the phone or by fax. At my previous job as an advertising rep at a small newspaper in California, I spent many Friday afternoons frantically typing real estate ads for the Sunday paper into our database, hoping that I didn’t miss any typos. I shared my enthusiasm for this new product, but the classified reps at the Globe were, understandably, wary of the new technology. I listened to the reps’ concerns and in the end I learned a lot more from them than they did from me.
I next went on to the marketing department to digitize the assets that advertising sales reps needed: maps, competitive analyses, custom demographic reports for customers. It doesn’t sound revolutionary now. At the time, it meant a sales rep could deliver materials digitally instead of driving them through Boston traffic.
