Third Age Matters is published five times each year, enjoying a circulation of over 223,000 (many households having more than one member).

U3A members interests include walking, foreign languages, music, theatre and play reading, art, creative writing, local history, computing, physical sciences, architecture, geology, religion, archaeology, biological sciences, literature, current affairs, bird watching, gardening etc.  Programmes of activities such as theatre and concert visits, crafts, outings to places of historical or general interest are planned together with many study tours, which are organised both in the UK and abroad.

Advertising Rates

For Display Advertising, please contact:

For Classified Advertising:

Artwork

Third Age Matters works with a printer that has extremely strict conditions for artwork supplied that cannot be overridden.

If artwork is supplied to Third Age Matters that does not conform to the guidance below, not only will it be automatically rejected by the printer’s computer system, any editorial page on which it is placed will also be rejected.

We can, therefore, make no exceptions to the requirements set out below.

If we receive advertisement artwork which does not conform to the guidance and which we cannot update to make it conform, we will ask for new artwork if there is time before our deadlines.

If new artwork is not supplied or we are too close to the deadline, we will amend the artwork supplied so that it will pass the printer’s checks. This may have unexpected effects on colour reproduction and other aspects of the advertisement’s appearance for which we can take no responsibility.

All advertisements must be supplied as high resolution, CMYK PDFs. There can be no exception to this.

Specifically, we CANNOT accept Microsoft Word or JPG files.

PLEASE NOTE that PDFs exported from Microsoft Word or other wordprocessing applications are most unlikely to meet the printer’s requirements.

We would prefer all PDFs to have crop and trim marks. Full-page advertisements with bleed MUST have crop and trim marks.

All full-page advertisements MUST have at least 3mm bleed on EACH side. We strongly advise against placing any text or other significant matter less than 5mm from the trimmed edge of an advertisement and can take no responsibility if this advice is not followed and trimming encroaches into this area.

By far the most significant reason for advertisements failing the printer’s pre-flight checks – and one which we can do nothing about – is the use of images which do not have sufficient resolution.

All images and other graphic artwork, including logos, drop shadows and other effects, must have a resolution AT LEAST 300 dpi when placed at the size at which they will be reproduced. If this condition is not met and new artwork that meets the printer’s specification cannot be supplied, we may convert the advertisement to another format and artificially increase the resolution. If this is required, we can take no responsibility for either colour accuracy or the quality of the images or graphics when printed.

PLEASE NOTE: Vector graphics produced in Adobe Illustrator or similar applications often cause an advertisement to fail the pre-flight checks because the “document raster effect settings” used to create the vector artwork were too low. The Illustrator default “high” setting of 300 dpi often produces images that will NOT pass the preflight checks. We RECOMMEND that any artwork produced in this way and used in InDesign or Quark Xpress to produce an advert for Third Age Matters be created with the “document raster effect settings” set to a minimum of 1200 dpi.

We strongly advise clients supplying PDF artwork for Third Age Matters to create it using the PDF/X-1a standard and, if possible, to use Adobe Acrobat Pro’s built-in flightcheck capabilities to check that it does, in fact, meet this standard.

Artwork which is not supplied to the size required may be reproduced at the required size – leading to distortion for which we cannot be held responsible.

We may be able to assist you with production of your advertisement at a cost of £50 per hour, with a minimum charge of £35. VAT at 20% must be added to the charge for any work done.