About five years into the business, I realized that was too much sale content and condensed my message down to the text that could fit on three “plane tickets” that inserted into what looks like the envelope that airlines give you at the check-in counter.

The other day, I was pulling one of those out of my cabinet to insert into a package of brochure samples. (It’s now down to just two “tickets” of text.)  I thought to myself, “That’s a lot of text! They’re not going to read all of this. I wouldn’t.”  To be candid, part of me actually hoped the person on the other end wouldn’t read it—that they’d (1) just be impressed by the atypical brochure format that won two national awards and (2) take a pass on the dated statistics and testimonials.

With the Internet literally in our hands, none of us have time or space for company brochures any more. Once they’re printed, company brochures hold content that can’t be changed or updated.  In contrast, clients and prospects can see real time content on our website and should see our most current promotional messages on our social media streams.

I’m not ready to sign a death certificate for the company brochure as a media; but we have to look at them differently, if they are to successfully attract and educate your prospects.

Value the reader’s time.
Often, the quantity of content can discourage readers from even starting to read your pitch.  Break your text into small chunks—quick paragraphs, short bulleted lists, or captions for photographs.  Boil your text down to a few paragraphs at the most.  If you have to say more, divide the content between different (most likely, smaller) topical pieces.

Drip your brand instead of lobbing a massive water balloon.
Don’t make one piece, send it once, and then consider it a failure if only a few people respond.  Create a series of succinct pieces that each respectively center around a specific topic or solution.  Design these pieces to look like each other—so much so that you could remove the logo and the pieces would still work together.  Let the compilation of impressions build on each other to equal more than the sum of the parts. With digital printing, short runs are more affordable than ever. If you have to cut anything, narrow the number of recipients to more qualified prospects.

Remove some of the piece’s responsibility.
Your company brochure might be a first or second impression, but it probably won’t be your only impression.  If the brochure doesn’t tightly match your auction advertising, your website, your business card, your vehicle graphics, your stationary, or your signage, it has either to compensate for those media or be carried by those media.  When all your media is lifting in unison, each piece has less of the weight of your brand to carry.  So, don’t order an expensive brochure, if your other media is printed at OfficeMax or designed by the sophomore computer science class.

Replace the brochure with a dimensional product.
Send your prospects something that literally looks and feels different from other advertising.  One of my clients sent a package of Oreo cookies to bank asset managers with a message along the lines, “These should be the only OREO’s on your desk,” along with specific, topical appeals that included a promise to bring milk to sales presentations.  My print shop gained over a hundred thousand dollars of business (and national attention in two magazines) by mailing tubes that contained shoe strings, a lottery ticket, and a dollar bill.

Change the text to be prospect-centric.
Most company brochures (like most proposals) say, “Here’s a company resume. Please hire us.” Speaking from my experience with Biplane’s promotion, the more I have to say, the more insecurity is driving the piece. Make the text address your prospects’ potential issues. When you use pictures, choose images that draw the topic into the reader’s context and make the scene more relatable.

Business owners often understand the golden rule when it comes to customer service.  It’s interesting to me, though, how often we overlook that guiding principle in marketing and don’t design advertising that we’d want to read, if the roles were reversed.  Give advertising unto others that you’d want given unto you; and see what happens to your company brochure—and your bottom line.

Taking it Personally

The day after President Obama was reelected, the Internet made us laugh with memes celebrating the end of the political advertising season.  Even hard core politicos found relief in ads for erectile dysfunction medications and Veterans Day mattress sales.

The marketing of political platforms and the marketing of faith systems both tend to forget the golden rule when it comes to promotion.  Snarky bumper stickers, defiant Facebook banners, heavy-handed billboards—okay, so maybe only election ads have smoker’s voice TV ads. But you get the idea.

Scare tactics make for great propaganda, and even Jesus peppered his talks with stern warnings for the unrepentant. But it was his compassion, his intimacy, his healing, and his authenticity that drew his closest followers.  Why? Because people don’t care what you know until they know that you care.

That’s true for evangelism of any kind, be it for brand or belief, agenda or affiliation.  Before we deploy our latest campaign or killer app, we should deploy the evaluative question, “Would this draw me to my audience’s perspective as much as I’m trying to move toward mine?”

If not, then what would?

I was one of four guys on our way back to the ladder-guarded entrance of the Maxwelton Cave. We had been operating by headlamp for about four hours, and I was ready for a bathroom break.

Since, cave conservationists ask that spelunkers relieve themselves only into moving water, I had limited my fluid intake and held my bladder until this point.  Reaching a perpendicular intersection, we had finally returned to the creek that in some form or fashion had carved the passageways we had traversed.

While I straddled the stream and contributed my own, the other three guys kept maneuvering steadily until I couldn’t hear them. With pants again zipped, I reversed my direction to head upstream in hopes of catching them.  I knew I had some ground to cover, as I couldn’t hear them anymore; and I didn’t see any headlamps.

I pointed my face toward the ceiling to get my bearings. I could see several layers of the passageway above me, each varying from maybe three to five feet apart. If you’ve been caving, you know what I mean: mud-covered rock wedges that reach toward each other or point toward a wall on one side. Each layer had once been the passage floor, until the stream carved its way to the next layer down. Each shelf jutted with irregular shape, creating a chasm that’s sometimes little wider than your head and sometimes a wide stride apart.

At different times during our trip, we had walked on different levels, thanks to our guides’ cumulative knowledge of which would be the fastest and easiest route.  For the life of me, I couldn’t remember which one we had used to get to this point; and since my back and not my eyes were turned toward my compadres when they made the turn, I knew only one thing: upstream.

Complicating the matter was that I held both my personal backpack and the backpack with the wire ladder we had used to traverse a vertical section.  So, I couldn’t climb freely and have someone hand me the bags. The ledges in most places weren’t flat enough, big enough, or sloped slowly enough to throw both the bags up to the next level and then climb to them. So, with at least one backpack on my person at a time, I attempted more than once to chimney or pull myself up to the second level.

Eventually, I made it to the second tier and was straddling the creek, feet pressed toward the walls of the corridor. If you had caved with me before this trip, you’d know that straddling and negotiating elevated chimney positions puts butterflies in my stomach. This moment was no different.

I could hear myself breathing. The light from my head lamp showed that fog of dusty particles to which cavers have grown accustomed. I could hear the water gurgling toward the small falls below my bathroom “stall.”

It was going to be slow going, as the ledges were muddy and steep. But the other guys had made it, and I knew they’d wait for me at the next intersection. Bracing myself, I inched upstream, trying to determine the best places to wedge my feet. Once one boot was fairly secure, I reached the other to the next foothold. Wash; rinse; repeat.

All of a sudden, my left foot slid down the muddy foothold into the dark space below the ledges. Seemingly in slow motion, my weight followed my foot; and my right foot buckled and slid from its muddy ledge.

Fulfilling my fears from past perches, I fell through the crevice. I bounced off the rock on one side of the passageway and then the other before I heard my boots splash into the stream and crunch the gravel under the water.

My legs were trembling. I looked at my hands. They were trembling. I felt instantly weak. I knew I would struggle to climb again by myself, but I couldn’t stay there. I told myself not to panic.

At once, I decided that I could probably follow the creek until a spot where a vertical climb would be easier. With my backpack on my chest and the ladder bag on my back, I briskly stomped upstream—taking care not to hit my face on any of the shelves or outcroppings.

Within a short period of time, I came to a long, rectangular rock spanning the stream and remembered the guide saying that we had crawled down from the main corridor to the stream at that place. “Remember ‘the bridge’ on our way back!”

I stopped and lifted my eyes toward the next level. There, the glow of my LED’s caught the forms of Jack and our guides. Crouched with their lamps turned off, they smiled at me. “We were seeing if you’d remember. Chuck was right: you remembered.”

In that moment, they gave me credit for recalling the bridge.  “You passed the test.” Little did my fellow cavers know, though, that I had forgotten “the bridge” until I saw it; and little did they know that my real test was not looking up from “the bridge” but looking inside myself after my fall to find the composure to keep moving.

The fifteen seconds after my fall held a moment of truth for me. I’ve failed so many times in stressful or frenetic situations; but for a few minutes and while a few stories below the Lewisburg, WV, airport, I pulled it together and pressed through my aloneness, insufficiencies, and pain to find the spoonful of composure hidden in my chest.

And then I moved to Virginia.

For multiple years now, my new home commonwealth has been ranked as the best state in which to start a business; but it has been a tough place to start a clean driving record.

See, I learned to drive in Maryland, where radar detectors were legal and the roads were as smooth as you’d expect from the number one state road system as ranked by AAA. Maryland, where I was once was in the slow lane, doing 85mph (in a 65mph zone), while being passed by—no joke—a dump truck.

In my first four years in Virginia, I piled six speeding tickets and one warning onto my driving record. The two that got me in trouble, though, happened in just one of those years. And that was the problem.

Double Whammy

Virginia had a law that stated that, if a driver earned two tickets in one calendar year for speeds in excess of twenty miles per hour over the limit, they automatically lost their license—regardless of how many points they had on their record. So, a Wednesday night dash on Old Forest Road to our Spanish-speaking church (to install an A/V cable before a service) and then an argument with my wife while in the HOV lane of I-66 in Manassas earned me my first certified post from the DMV.  That letter sentenced me to a day in remedial driving school, where my fellow classmate bragged about riding with heat, in case he had to let somebody know—you know.

Driver re-education knocked a bunch of points off my license but didn’t save me from 90 days of a suspended drivers license, which allowed me to drive only for work purposes. Thankfully, as a self-employed worker, almost everywhere in Lynchburg was on the way to a Bank of America branch, a post office, Staples, or pro bono client. So, I kept a check to cash in the car with my excuse letter and drove like my mother-in-law does.

Double Time

That was 2006. After getting my license reinstated, I was placed on a 6-month probation. Earning no tickets during that time, my license was spared from being suspended again and was awarded an 18-month “control period.” The deal was this: if I got a ticket during that year and a half, I went back to probation. You get the idea.

Fast forward to December 2008—two weeks from trading my first MINI Cooper S in for my current one and, more importantly, six weeks from the end of this whole 27-month deal. My YMCA lifting partner had just left me for ultramarathon running, and I was on my way to the gym an hour later than normal—just in time for basketball. I saw some blinking lights at an intersection and thought they were the ones that announce that the light was about to turn red. Nope. They were school zone lights for a school not yet open—and with no entrances on that road. So, despite doing 44mph in a 45mph zone, I was busted for 19mph over the limit.

When the officer pulled me over a mile later, I told him my situation. He told me my record showed no points—as in zero. I explained that my license wasn’t suspended for points. So, the kind policeman post-dated my court date until after my “control period” and wished me luck. I plead guilty and thought I’d walked out the court room a free man.

Unappealable

Then I got a letter from the DMV saying my license was being suspended. When I called the Richmond office, the cold, condescending agent told me that the conviction date didn’t matter. Infraction date was their point of reference, and no DMV decision was appealable or influenced by local jurisdictions. Also, because I had gotten another ticket somehow in the same exact spot (fittingly, in front of a doughnut shop) within weeks of my court date, the dynamic duo of tickets knocked me all the way back to the suspension that preceded the six months that preceded the eighteen months. The clock was reset to 26 months this time, instead of 27.

That was almost four years ago.

Somewhere in there I got a ticket in one county (Bedford) for a speeding infraction in another (Campbell). The kicker: the police officer told me I got caught, only because of the vivid vinyl wrap on my car. Paraphrase: “It was so interesting, I paid attention to your car that I hadn’t realized was speeding; but then I saw the radar gun.” Didn’t matter, as my tickets usually come in bunches; and in 2010, they came as a trio. If you’re scoring at home, you should have eleven tickets in eight years. Amazingly enough, I still qualified for my insurance company’s good driver program, while having to swap my driver’s license multiple times.

Relief

Somehow, I made it to today. Don’t ask me how. I didn’t deserve it.

I went to the mail box. There were a couple early birthday cards, a $4,800 paycheck, and a letter-size envelope from the DMV. I had just paid a renewal fee on my license; so, I thought it might be a receipt or something. All my correspondence in the past about the status of my driving record had arrived via certified mail; so, I wasn’t prepared for what I was about to read—especially since I thought my freedom date was in December.

No DMV spokesperson. No phone call. No request to come down to the DMV branch office to get some special new driver’s license. As unceremoniously and anonymously as my freedom was snatched, it was restored.

I wanted to shout at my mailbox, but my neighbor was washing his Yukon; and I’m already the crazy, orange-mohawk guy in the neighborhood.

The speed limits haven’t changed. Cruisers still hide between the median mounds and behind the shoulder obstructions around my fair city. The DMV is no more merciful. But today, for the first time in six years, I’m not looking over my shoulder—because nobody’s looking over mine.

And I usually respond to that surprise with “The bakery folks get here way before I do.”  In fact, the bakery folks drive the few cars that we don’t direct; and they get front row parking on the hill.

The hill is a mowed-grass area above and behind the 425 paved spots reserved for those who attend my church but don’t serve there yet.  There are no parking spot lines painted on the hill’s grass. Even if there were, hill parkers would struggle to see them.  See, through much of the year, worship, tech, and KidStuf team members arrive behind their headlights, because the sun hasn’t risen yet.

That’s where I come into the picture.  My role includes setting reflective cones out on the road and over 60 cones on the campus to direct traffic.  I wear a blue L.E.D. headlamp on my reflective cap and wave orange light wands in front of my reflective vest.  I organize the hill just by how I park the early arrivers—in rows two vehicles deep with ten paces’ worth of exit aisle in between the rows.  Once I get all the rows started, I descend to the asphalt to meet my first service parking team for prayer and then greet the vehicles that carry the thousand or so people that will fill the building by 8:30am.

At least a couple times a month, one of the pre-dawn arrivers will say something like, “Thanks for what you do up here.”  From the way it usually sounds, I feel compelled to tell them, “Oh, I love it up here.  I get to watch the moon set and the sun rise.  I get to start my worship early.”

It’s not really serving to me.  The air is fresh and usually crisp.  The sky is huge and not polluted by the retail and restaurant lights that refract in the sky above my city subdivision.  Many of the people walking down the hill to the building are friends, and this is my weekly non-Facebook interaction with them.  After working in my basement all week, I’m ready for both fresh breaths, an infinite ceiling, and the human interaction.

This past Sunday, though, a tangible “thank you” took me by surprise.  Bakery volunteers, Faith and Mindy, were walking in the dark from the building toward the hill.  From the light poles down on the asphalt, I could see that their hands held a napkin, a drink, and a ‘roni roll—hot out of the oven.

I buy and eat between 75 and 100 ‘roni rolls each year from my church’s cafe, which sells food only on Sundays and breakfasts for only about three hours on those Sundays.  I’m known for my addiction to these breakfast rolls and their shredded pepperoni & cheese fillings.  Long story short, that ‘roni roll was for me on the first cool Sunday morning of 2012′s autumn.

It was an emotional moment for me, yet I didn’t know how to feel.  I was moved by the gesture, but I felt awkward for being the sole recipient.  Love, respect, and appreciation wafted with the smell of bread, protein, and dairy; but I didn’t feel like what I love to do needed to be rewarded.  This was a welcome moment on the horizontal level, and I felt something vertical in motion.

So, I’m writing all of this to:

1. process that moment, because I’ve spent all week trying to determine how to retell an indelible scene that has me choked up, even 160 hours later as I type, and
2. shed light on the hearts of the people who serve in the Blue Ridge Community Church cafe as a token of gratitude for their thoughtful gesture.

As for my personal takeaway, this is what I’ve got right now:

• God’s heart is expressed by the actions that spill from ours.
• Finding where God wants you to serve will be rewarding in itself, but sometimes he puts a cherry on top.
• I am blessed beyond what I deserve.
• Don’t pass on opportunities laid on your heart to encourage someone else in their calling.
• Share poignant moments with others.

How ’bout you? If this happened to you, what would be your takeaway?

1.    ”I love you.”
2.    ”I want to spend my life with you.”
3.    ”I got you this ring.” [usually non-verbally communicated]
4.    ”Will you marry me?”

These steps prove so common, they smell of cliche; but there aren’t too many ways around that outline. That’s just how marriage proposals work.

Believe it or not, those same four steps work well for business proposals, especially auction proposals to sellers.

“I love you.”
“
Translation: “I value what you bring to this relationship.”


Sellers know we want a commission and that we wouldn’t be offering our services without a price tag. What they’re hoping is that we care about their assets—and not just another pay check—and that we’ll handle their sale with the care we would give our own sale.

One way to communicate this is to discuss the attributes of their assets that will interest buyers—what makes them unique or valuable. Follow this with explaining what part of your plan is connected to these attributes. Here are some examples:

“Due to the location of your property, signs will be more critical to the advertising campaign than our typical campaign. We recommend spending a higher percentage of the budget on banners that cover your building to attract attention.”

“Because of how new your restaurant equipment is, we will reach out to our list of restaurant chain developers in addition to our recent bidder lists of three similar Outback restaurant auctions that we held last year.”

“Not all auctions are newsworthy; but with your recent interstate PowerBall win and now famous tweet about your move to a private island, the human interest part of this auction’s story can be leveraged for maximum exposure. We’re going to bring in a public relations consultant to help us craft a press release that will attract members of the media.”

“I want to spend my life with you.” 

Translation: “This could be an ongoing, mutually-beneficial reality.”


Clients, like spouses, crave long-term security. Sellers want to know that we’ll stay attentive to their project amidst our others during the marketing campaign—especially for absolute/no-reserve auctions.

Put them at ease by describing all the expectations to which your willing to be held. Show them a detailed timeline of what you’ll do and when. Note when or how often you’ll communicate with them about market response and the progress of the campaign. Explain specific actions you’ll take to make their situation less stressful, less complicated, or less prolonged.

Empathy is huge for trust. That means letting people know that we realize that this is their treasured collection, their lifetime achievement, or their financial security that’s at stake. Each situation will determine what is professionally appropriate to say; and this doesn’t have to be a verbose section of a proposal, but intentionally moving into this perspective for even one sentence can be enough to separate ourselves from the competition.

“I got you this ring.” 

Translation: “Here’s my indicative deposit on good things to come.”


I remember a dude in college going room to room in our dorm building, asking for donations to help him buy a $500 engagement ring. He must have gotten enough donations. She said, “Yes,” and he’s still married to her more than a decade later; but it wasn’t the ring that sold her on life with him. Sometimes, we get the auction in spite of the proposal instead of because of it.

If our proposals look like cheap and easy templates—especially Word documents with a few variable data mentions bolded like a mail merge letter—we communicate to sellers that they are just a number, a transaction, another notch on our belts. The amount of time and effort and even financial investment our proposal connotes (whether real or assumed) reflects on the level of individuality, creativity, and professionalism we’ll bring to marketing their assets.

One sentence that regularly makes its way into my clients’ proposals reads something along the lines of, “We hope this proposal illustrates our level of commitment not only to book your auction but also to get you the most bidders and highest sale proceeds possible for your asset.” Would you be confident enough to make that statement in your cover letter?

“Will you marry me?”

Translation: “Does this look like a good deal to you?”


A difficult reality of business proposals is that we’re asking a seller to marry us on a first, second, or even blind date. Because a history with us can’t inform the future with us, we need to build the case that it will be a good deal. By using graphs of past results, samples of advertising from similar auctions, and pull quotes from people in their shoes you’ve served in the past, you can establish a track record that casts for them a vision for the future.

Unlike a résumé, though, this all needs to be framed by their benefit. Only a fool would drop to his knee and tell his girlfriend, “I was voted ‘Least Likely to Divorce’ in high school. I graduated from college with both academic and humanitarian honors and got the lone internship offered by Mark Zuckerburg this year. I have written over 450 love letters in my dating career and have attended the Certified Lover Institute. I’m a member of the National Association of Romantic Beaus. You can trust your married life in my hands.”

How many times do auction proposals read like that?

If we talk about what we bring to the table, we need to do so in a way that gives them more confidence than it gives us. For instance: “Our membership in [national franchise/alliance/affiliate network] connects us with more industrial real estate investors and the collaboration of multiple auctioneers who have sold paper production plants like yours.” Or: “Our hundreds of state and national marketing awards mean that our sellers get the best advertising available. We want our clients not only to get the biggest-possible settlement checks but also to be proud of how their assets are shown to their peers and the general public.”

Yes, all of this means more work; but that extra work on this end might just be the difference between you getting the work on the other end of the proposal.

Taking it Personally

Throughout the Bible’s newer testament, Christians are told that we will some day marry Jesus and be his bride.  As a dude, that’s still weird to me. At the same time, it’s utterly humbling.

The bride is supposed to be the beautiful half of the wedding and the ensuing marriage. Jesus, our promised groom, lived a perfect life, a selfless existence. He did more good than any human will ever replicate.  Everything about him is beautiful. Nobody can even aspire to the beauty of his soul, the transformative gaze of his eyes, the gentle healing of his touch.

Contrastingly, we smell of unfaithfulness. We have been muddied by sin and disfigured by guilt. Our teeth are decayed by gorging ourselves on the delicacies of selfishness. We walk our life journey with a limp.

Still he loves us. He wants us. He cherishes us. He’s preparing a wedding even David Tutera can’t imagine and then an eternal honeymoon in a magical city on the other side of the universe. And he invites all of us through an eternal proposal into his mercy, grace, and redemptive power.

I don’t deserve it, and I definitely don’t understand it. But, man, am I grateful for it!

Newspaper syndicates are laying off literally hundreds of staff. Across the industry, the workforce has plummeted almost 30% in the past five years. ^[1]  Some publications are closing their doors entirely, their company obituaries listed here. Others are selling out to conglomerate ownership groups and sharing editorial and advertising content, hoping efficiencies of scale keep them in the black.

Most of the advertising money draining from newsprint is flooding to Internet advertising outlets like Google, whose 2011 revenues totaled $4 billion more than the cumulative revenues of all newspapers in the country. ^[2] While large-circulation newspapers are developing traffic and advertising revenue from their websites, smaller newspapers are relying on home town news and photos of local citizens to keep the presses rolling.

These changes directly impact the businesses whose analytic measurement shows buyers still responding to their newsprint advertising. [You are measuring where your customers heard about your sale items or events, right?] Knowing a few of the new realities will help you better adapt to them.

Multi-Paper Conglomerates

The newspapers that have survived thus far are owned by fewer and fewer companies. Some of the syndicates are national entities that cherry pick seemingly-random cities to cover. Most, though, are regional corporations that start or buy publications in the same county or part of a state.

When I research publications in an area new to me, I regularly ask the salesperson if their company publishes other papers. That question has saved me a lot of time by not having to research other papers individually. It also puts asset-based publications like real estate inserts on my radar, as these subsidiary media aren’t typically listed in newspaper directories (even online ones).

Conglomerates organize their multiple advertising sections three ways:

1.  Each publication has its own classifieds section but dollar amounts or percentages are deducted from the unit costs of the second, third, etc. paper you add to the mix.
2.  Publications are grouped by geographic zones. If you want one paper, you have to pay for that ad to appear in multiple newspapers in a region (usually several suburbs or areas in a county) but not all the publications owned by the corporation.
3.  All papers share the same classifieds. If you want one paper, you have to pay for all of them. The bigger the group, the scarier this can be. If you were planning to hit all of the publications anyway, though, the unit price value can be good.

Typically, you don’t have a choice in which of these models are available. So, it’s important to know which one you’re facing before submitting a marketing plan to your seller. Because these groups regularly acquire and sometimes close newspapers, it’s good to keep your rate cards up to date.

Column Size Shell Game


In addition to cutting costs, newspapers are looking for ways to increase revenues from the same advertiser base. One method they use is changing their column format. This works two ways.

1.   They add a column or two to the page, which shrinks each column; but they charge the same price for that column. Example A (below) illustrates this. The advertiser gets 11% less square inch area for the same price. In other words, the newspaper raises their rates 11% without changing the price they quote you per column inch.
2. Or, as I’ve seen in the past year, they drastically drop the quantity of columns as in example B below. The publication then raises the price per column inch, justifying it as paying for the additional space. If you measure the actual cost per square inch—as opposed to cost per column inch—you might be surprised to find the rate increase is not proportional to size increase.

Not only does this tactic jack with your newspaper ad templates [You do have print ad templates, right?], it can cause embarrassing situations after the marketing plan has been approved. Sadly, I know this from experience. The ad size and/or price you had in the budget ends up looking very different than expected during the marketing period. This newspaper ploy gives another reason to verify advertising costs and sizes in the proposal stage—at least if you haven’t used a publication in more than six months.

High Staff Turnover Rates


With tight margins, most newspapers are paying their sales representatives somewhere between burger flipper and day laborer rates. Okay, it’s more than that but not much more. And with all the stress of coordinating literally hundreds of advertisers each week, it’s understandable that classified departments burn through employees as fast as NASCAR drivers burn through tires.

This means that if you pull up an email address from your contacts list or an old email to copy, it might not get answered. Sadly, it’s not enough any more to email before the space reservation deadline to make it into the issue. Combat this by emailing the advertising representative as soon as you know you’ll have some kind of advertising—even if you don’t know the size or all run dates yet. If you don’t get a quick answer, call the department. What I like even better is asking the paper for a generic department email address to which I can carbon copy advertising emails, something I regularly do here in Virginia.

As backup, I’ve built an Excel spreadsheet of my most regularly-used newspapers that shows the best day of the week to run, deadline days & times, column or unit sizes, pricing, and contact information. One of the information fields shows the last date I updated the record. If that date is more than six months old, I know to inquire about price changes, sales representative updates, etc.

Statewide Classified Networks


Most states have newspaper associations, and most of those associations offer distribution of classified advertising in all of their member publications for a nominal fee.  All states with this service offer in-column line ads; most also offer two-column by two-inch displays ads; and some even offer two-column by four-inch display ads. You can tell your sellers that you canvased the state for about the cost of one metro print ad.  The rep from your home state can place ads in any of the other state association networks as well.

The major drawback to this product is not knowing where that ad will appear in those publications. When you deal individually with publications, you can request specific sections or classified categories. While many network papers might go to the work of putting your ad in the appropriate column, your ad might also end up in a grouped statewide section with erectile dysfunction and “make thousands working from home” ads.

Also, if you skip an online distribution service for press release submission and want to focus on media within a particular state, many of these state networks offer press release distribution not only to their print media members but also to the broadcast news media members (for an extra fee).

All media is adapting to technological advancements and changing audience habits, but the newspaper industry seems to have the toughest road to relevance. An observant eye will help us as advertisers take advantage of the deals and restrictions that stem from this newspaper landscape to best serve our customers.

Taking it Personally

My first published piece of writing that I can remember came in my dad’s weekly column in the Queen Anne’s County Record Observer, now part of an 18-publication media group. Dad kindly and generously ran two or three of my didactic pieces. The quality of the writing proves less embarrassing than the clichéd content. It’s been years since I perused those, but I have little doubt the paragraphs proved that they poured from an unrehabilitated fundamentalist—an extremest regurgitating talking points between Bible verses.

Every year or so, I reread parts of the book I wrote a decade ago and feel similar embarrassment at some of the things I stated or asked—even though written with prayer and intention for God’s use. While part of me wants people to know I wrote a book, a large part of me hopes they never read it. In fact, I’ve got three free copies sitting on my desk awaiting shipment to Facebook connections; and what’s been keeping me from shipping them are those sections that no longer ring true inside of me.

That old ignorance is why I don’t plan on writing another faith-premised book in my lifetime. I hope I will constantly be growing, constantly seeing Christ’s heart more clearly. I hope that, even next year, I look back with gratitude at the ignorance shed from my August 2, 2012, self.

1. ^[1] “LinkedIn: Newspaper Industry Shrinks at Fastest Rate” by BtoBOnline.com. March 19, 2012. ↩
2. ^[2] “6 Trends for Newspapers in 2012, from a Sunday Boom to an Executive Bust” by Rick Edmonds, Poynter.org. March 19, 2012. ↩

I later learned that a storm had wreaked havoc from Indiana to the Atlantic Coast.  I heard that one of my local Walmart Supercenters lost over a million dollars worth of perishable food; restaurants lost thousands of dollars of freezer inventory; hospitals went to triage mode with backup generators; lines at the few gas stations that had power stretched for as much as an hour for people to pump $5 rations of fuel; and Netflix, Instagram, and Pinterest temporarily ceased operation, as their servers fell victim to the power outage.

Utility crews from around the country migrated to help literally millions of Virginians without power.  Even with all the outside help and local linemen putting in 140-hour work weeks, it took as long as eleven days for power to return to all parts of the greater Lynchburg area.  My home office was fortunate to be without power for only 112 hours.  While I had to take cold showers, sleep on my basement floor to beat the 100º daily heat, and move my office setup to my wife’s Main Street studio, those relatively small inconveniences paled in comparison to those of the people who literally lost their homes or even their lives.

The culprit for these millions of dollars of damage? A derecho—a unique kind of windstorm that doesn’t swirl in the pattern to which we are accustomed.  Instead, a slightly-bowed wall of clouds bulldozes across the landscape, pushing powerful winds in front of it.  “Unlike other thunderstorms, which typically can be heard in the distance when approaching, a derecho seems to strike suddenly.  Within minutes, extremely high winds can arise, strong enough to knock over highway signs and topple large trees.”†

In about 30 minutes, probably less, my city was crippled; and roads lined with stately trees became disaster areas.

If this (Spanish) word, derecho, is new to you, know that it was new to me, too.  I have a feeling I’ll be using it long after this storm tops my local news, though.  See, the advertising that I help auctioneers leverage follows the derecho’s pattern.

Unlike private listings, consignment retail, or traditional brokerage, my clients know how long their asset will be on the market.  And that amount of time is short—days or weeks, very rarely months.  Since an auction asset’s carrying costs have a defined end and since the amount which can be spent on marketing is also known, auctioneers can concentrate their expenditures within a small window of time.  They don’t have to hedge their bets, wondering how much they’ll have to invest and for how long.  Auctioneers can multiply the impact of their event’s core message across a wide but shallow wall of media, sometimes as little as a week deep.

There aren’t a lot of message changes in auction marketing campaigns like political campaigns exhibit.  You won’t see a glut of impressions per media as with Fortune 500 branding campaigns (think: NFL game TV commercials).  There are rarely focus groups and multi-pronged audience testing like those used for product launching campaigns.  Instead of slowly spinning toward landfall like a hurricane and sitting down in areas of low pressure, auction campaigns push the market with a sense of urgency.

The risk in an auction’s concentrated marketing campaign is that the perfect buyer or strongest bidder might not be available, ready to purchase, or engaging with pertinent media during the advertising’s lifespan; but that risk applies in some degree to all advertising.  More and more, I’m convinced that the challenge of finding the right people at the right time is (1) the reason biplane productions has stayed in business and (2) the opportunity to prove the auction method’s value proposition to sellers tempted to sell their items on their own.

The danger of auction marketing derechos is that it can create incredible goals for branding outside of auction campaigns.  Despite dropping back to fewer media, we’re tempted to expect similarly-immediate results.  The honing of a core message as well as the creative representation and application of that message should take much longer than the standard assembly-line auction workflow.  While there may be occasions for media blitzes or public relations urgency, the time and effort spent in brand building and brand management should be somewhat proportional to the time it’s expected to last.

I don’t know if it’s appropriate to compare what my clients and I do for a living to a deadly, expensive natural disaster.  That said, if the advertising we generate could engulf our buying community like Derecho 2012 has my physical community, we’d all have the job security of an American Electric Power lineman.

Taking it Personally

Outside of backpacking trips, I’ve never been without electricity for as long as we endured last week—let alone during a string of days north of 100º.  People a generation ahead of me opined about how the blistering heat of their un-air-conditioned youth resembled that week every summer.  Friends from my generation talked about realizing how dependent we are on gadgets and conveniences.  Everybody else was watching a movie in an air conditioned theater, swimming in a friend’s pool, or lining Cracker Barrel rocking chairs, waiting for a table.

My takeaway from Derecho 2012 was a consideration of response.  How do we—how do I, specifically—respond to setbacks beyond our control?  I’ve long struggled with that.  Along my spiritual journey, this has been one of the main sections of road construction—one I’ve too often taken too long to traverse because of exploring my own detours and finding them dead ends.  For too long I blamed God as much or more than myself for sticky situations.  I questioned his goodness, despite the overwhelming evidence of it in the macro view of my life.

This storm gave me another test in this area.  It might sound small, but I paid attention in this challenge to small things like praying for others instead of myself, not worrying about bridge crossings until I got there, and making my social media comments humorous or journalistic instead of whiny.  Rather than worry about the billable work time lost, I embraced the lost grid with an unconstructive weekend and reconnected with friends.

Sometimes, progress is measured in inches instead of miles.  Mine, anyway.

†”Derecho,” Wikipedia.com

Even though I passed both of the auction billboards twice, I never did finish reading their respective messages. Some might be tempted to blame part of that on high interstate speed limits and even higher traffic speeds. Some could even make the case that I’m not the fastest reader. Hopefully, the majority of travelers would agree with me, though, that there was simply way too much text to be absorbed during the short time of interaction.

The billboards I saw looked like the 25-word line ads I regularly place in statewide classified networks. There was no hierarchy of fonts or colors, sizing or bolding. Everything was emphasized, which means nothing was. They looked like Jenga stacks of text blocks. With no images or unused (“white”) space, those text blocks abutted the edges of the signs—crammed in the boundaries like alphabet sardines.

I’ve designed busy billboards that I’ve later been ashamed to pass on the highway; so, this post isn’t meant to denigrate these different auction companies’ work. That said, there are some lessons from my interaction with these signs.

Context is Crucial
What works on a billboard doesn’t work on Facebook. What works on YouTube doesn’t work in direct mail. And what works on AuctionZip doesn’t work on radio. Advertisers face an ever-growing array of advertising media.  One of the biggest challenges of this reality is adapting the message delivery to the nuances of each medium. Rather than simply copying and pasting from one medium to another, we need to ask ourselves about who the audience is in each medium and how they interact with that medium.

Time Flies
In my recent Certified Auctioneers Institute class, I hid a gift card in a stack of mail from home and asked for a volunteer to flip through the stack like they would at home until they found it. My volunteer averaged less than two seconds of viewing time per direct mail piece—about half the time that I had to read the passing billboards. We need to simplify our initial advertising impressions to the answer of the question, “If I could communicate just one thing—one thought—what would it be?”

Simplicity Sells
Less is almost always more. In advertising, sentences trump paragraphs, and phrases trump sentences. If the headline doesn’t sell our asset or service, adding more words will not make the sale. One of the easiest ways to subtract words is to replace them with images of the assets being described.

Images Expedite Absorption
We live in a show-then-tell culture. Pictures are shortcuts, and we all read images before text. Since we have limited time for interaction, it’s baffling to me why more marketers don’t use shortcuts like photos.

Margin Matters
Space around words makes them easier to read. The space around text can also signify importance and hierarchy. If we don’t have color or images with which to work, the next best thing for getting our message absorbed is empty space around what is important.

Good advertising is more often a result of subtraction than addition. Consider an advertisement as a collection of shares of impression. The fewer the shares, the more each share is worth—and the more likely they’ll be remembered.

Taking it Personally

The wedding I attended took place in a one-room country church, built in bygone years with an adjacent cemetery. While the wedding party was smiling for their family pictures, I meandered between the headstones. Looking at the landscape from my drive and the collections of birth and death dates at this graveyard, I was struck by many of the same lessons for life as the billboards were for advertising.

My interaction with others needs to be tempered to the context of the moment.
The Bible says to use days wisely, since I don’t know how many days I’ll get on this planet.
There is beauty is untangled, unhurried life. Find the simple pleasures in life and sit down in the moment with them.
The observation—the images—of the life I live will say as much or more as the words I write—no matter how much I write.
The concept of margin (rest) starts in Genesis, when even the Creator took a day to reflect on creation.

I’ve heard these lessons many times, but I have a short memory and even an smaller store of discipline. I’m thankful to a God who takes me to new places and old places to remind me of his timeless truths.

Proxibid, a longstanding vendor for third-party online bidding, had announced a change in their structure. From what I gather, Proxibid was now going to allow non-auctioneers to sell their wares through the Proxibid system—a system that had been assumed as an auctioneer-only environment. Some viewed this expansion as a deceptive change of plans; others defended Proxibid for attempting to grow the potential buyer base.

I don’t have a dog in the fight. Some of my clients use Proxibid; some use one of several Proxibid competitors; others use proprietary systems for their online bidding. My job is the same no matter where the bidders bid—whether onsite or online: find as many prospective buyers as possible and entice them to bid.

When I joined the National Auctioneers Association in 2003, there were thousands more members in the association than we have now. While the auction industry’s collective revenues are holding—if not growing—the number of full-time auction practitioners in the country seems to be shrinking. I’ve heard anecdotal evidence to confirm this rapid constriction in the profession at large. That leads me to believe that there’s a lot of competition for work. In this Proxibid shift, it’s apparent that some auctioneers are worried about the pool of professional auctioneers shrinking further due to sellers being able to help themselves to online bidding and the buyers that gather at Proxibid.com.

As a sole proprietor who depends on family-sized businesses to hire me instead of helping themselves to online vendors, I understand that worry.  It’s real and deserved concern that fewer and fewer auctioneers will deem Biplane Productions worth its fees, that they’ll keep the work in-house instead of outsourcing—or that they’ll outsource to a hungrier freelancer.

I’ve had stout competition since my first day in business in 2002.  There are far more graphic designers in the country than auctioneers, and that ratio grows every graduation season. As of 2008, there were almost 300,000 designers in the country. As just one of the trade groups in my industry, the American Institute of Graphic Artists alone has multiple times the membership of the National Auctioneers Association.

I’ve been outnumbered by my competition for a long time. So has every auctioneer for whom I’ve worked and every auctioneer I’ve ever met. Auction marketers have competed with sellers and non-auctioneers since before we had a national association. That won’t change, and Proxibid won’t be the last Internet market place to help sellers help themselves.

The challenge, then, for all of us marketers is to create and prove value to potential clients—value they can’t achieve by doing the work themselves or by posting their wares on a website, even one built on the backs of innovative and successful auctioneers.

For me, that value proving included a transition into selling and delivering on my auction advertising knowledge base as much or more than my reputation for graphic design speed. My revenue efficiency has fluctuated, as I’ve contributed to more complicated campaigns. I’m serving auction companies that regularly now combine 10, 20, even 40-some properties in single auction campaigns. I’m accepting job orders in late afternoons that require overnight designs.

It’s not martyrdom. It’s most definitely not exclusive to Biplane Productions. It’s adapting. The Darwinian nature of capitalism requires it, and technology is accelerating the need for it.

I’ll let other people debate whether Proxibid’s move was harmful or advantageous to the auction industry and whether or not their expansion happened in good faith. That’s not my fight.

What is my fight is making auction advertising so attractive and effective that people keep hiring auctioneers to sell their assets.

Taking it Personally

At church, I’ve been on a team exploring the book of Ecclesiastes in which the wise Hebrew king, Solomon, pronounces no value to accomplishment in terms of wealth, power, or pleasure. Over and over, the sage proclaims the meaninglessness of chasing success—probably because it’s a moving target that doesn’t move with us into our next lives.

On my recent vacation, one of my pastors and I were chatting about my record workload over the past eight months. He asked a simple pair of questions that keeps reverberating inside my head: “Can you just get rid of some clients? Is it as easy as that?”

I told him that after I finish eradicating the rest of our non-mortgage debt, I’ll be considering strategies for sifting my client list. I told him that, right now, I just brace for the seasonal and unpredictable nature of my work, taking my career’s lumps with its advantages.

At some point, though, there will be an intersection with my faith and my insecurities. At some point, I’ll stop worrying about losing business or losing a career to my next stage of life. At some point, I won’t care if you consider me an expert instead of a freelancer in a basement.

Each time I read Ecclesiastes or close InDesign at 2:00 A.M., I’m getting closer to that point.

So, you’d think I would head to some resort on a beach, a cabin by a stream, or some European inn in a town with no clocks.

Instead, I’m flying, floating, then riding a bus to what’s rated as one of the most grueling hikes in North America—a rugged wilderness described by trail alumni on YouTube as a place where nobody escapes a battered body.  In fact, the Canadian Coast Guard and Parks Canada medevacs or otherwise rescues up to nine people a week from this stretch of ground—when only 52 people per day are allowed to enter the trail.

When I tell people where I’m going, I get two general responses.  The first: “That sounds awesome!” and more often: “Not me. Why would you do that?”  For the crowd who fall in that second camp, let me walk you through the reasoning.

True Escape
I can take a nap or read a book in my house, on my deck, or a park in town. So, I don’t understand spending four figures to do that in a remote location.  I have to go somewhere where I can do something I can’t do where I live.

Gridlessness
I get emails that literally start like this, “I know you’re on vacation, but I need [insert media here.]“  I have had clients call me after midnight to discuss their direct mail proofs.  I’ve had another ask, “When do you get on the plane?”  Auction marketers need things “yesterday” every day, and my company is one of the few firms in the country equipped to help with auction marketing emergencies. To make sure auctioneers can’t track me down and appeal to my pity, I go where there isn’t cell service or WiFi signal.

Individualism
I don’t suffer from agoraphobia, but I’m not comfortable with herd mentality, especially when it comes to vacations.  I live a half mile from Walmart.  If I wanted to be surrounded by obese, demanding American myopia, I’d walk down the hill.  I want to take the lesser traveled path and see the rarer sights.  Everyone has beachfront balcony pictures on Facebook.  I prefer pictures that stop the scroll and require captions.

Training Goal
I operate on goals.  I was the second grader who did 2.5 years of curriculum for the stars on my chart and the graphic design minor who slept 4.5 hours a night in college to keep up with the graphic design majors.  I need running races, muddy obstacle courses, and challenges to get me out of bed every day at 5:30, to guide my nutrition, to push my gym time to muscle failure.  Treks like this do more than provide emotional and spiritual medicine, they keep my body in a healthy place.

Adrenal Dump
My job proves an almost-constant adrenaline blitz.  My adrenal gland now requires something massive to dispense a rush.  To be fair, I don’t need a vacation to get an adrenaline kick.  If you’ve looked through my Facebook albums, you know I squeeze a good bit of adventure into the cracks between Fridays and Mondays.  But trips of this length let me take on rarer challenges, more immersive experiences.  Breaking a dam of pent adrenaline crashes a wave of catharsis through deep parts of my spirit.

Worship
My primary spiritual pathway (of the documented seven) is nature.  It took me 30 years to learn that.  I connect with the supernatural most through the ruggedly natural.  My busy seasons tend to choke my journey with Jesus.  Watching the symbiosis of the elements and the creativity behind their beauty bring me back to my knees and to prayers of gratitude.  Imbibing a world unarguably bigger and more intricate than my imagination reminds me of my place, my smallness, my need for something beyond my mortality.

Legacy
I don’t know how many days remain in the jar of my life.  And I don’t want to spend the ones I have, regardless of how many I have, on the perfunctory.  Back in 2006, I set my goal in life to experience physical and spiritual adventures in such a way that draws others to do the same.  I can’t do that clicking pictures through an AARP tour bus window, laying on a beach for a week, or eating on a boat the size of a shopping mall.

I know I’m more than exception than the rule in our culture.  I’m okay with that.  That means I’ll have a lot of beautiful real estate to myself this week.