Chicago Sun-Times to outsource ad production — The rest of the story

February 20th, 2008

Crain’s Chicago Business is reporting that the Chicago Sun-Times has decided to outsource its ad production to Elgin-based Affinity Express as a cost-saving move.

Here’s what the article, and Affinity’s website, doesn’t tell you about Affinity Express. While it is true that Affinity Express’ corporate headquarters are in Elgin, Illinois, the design work is outsourced to a design sweatshop in Pune, India and Manila, Phillipines. The work coming out of these sweatshops is substandard and awful.

When I worked for Kinko’s the second time around (around the time of the FedEx buyout), they had outsourced the job I had held my first time around with Kinko’s to Affinity. There was a procedure to input the order on their website. One of the items on the web form was creativity, with a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being ‘do it exactly the way the instructions state’ to 10 being ‘be creative.’ One memorable job was someone who wanted an 11″ x 17″ sign advertising Smoothies at $2.99. It was marked to ‘be creative.’ When it came back, this was Affinity’s idea of a creative smoothies sign: The background was a solid dark orange, with black Arial type set at only 72pt, and clip-art ice cream cones - 4 of them - on the left side of the page.

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