The ad manager job just got a lot less magical

Wherever+you+go%2C+whomever+you+come+in+contact+with%2C+smile+a+bit.+--Christian+Yost

“Wherever you go, whomever you come in contact with, smile a bit.” –Christian Yost

When you ask Christian Yost what he learned as ad manager for The Sunflower, he says he learned that he is “a terrible salesman.” Really, it’s quite the opposite.

For most of the year, Christian sold almost as much in ads, on his own, as we did last year when we had a few students working on our sales staff. He’s set up multiple long-term contracts with advertisers and stepped up when we had hundreds of people ordering our Sunflower T-shirts (which are still up for sale if you haven’t already bought one).

Christian, a music education major and part-time magician, took on a full-time job when he was already a full-time music student doing observations for his teaching program. Because of his busy schedules, he would come into his office at the crack of dawn, before his classes began, to catch up on work.

One of my favorite moments with Christian this year was before President Bardo pulled the original budget recommendation. While we were all in the newsroom panicking about our future, Christian came up with selling ‘efforts.’

For background, during the student fees deliberations, former Student Body President Paige Hungate said that the paper — and namely, Christian —wasn’t putting in enough ‘effort’ to sell ads. So Christian came up with the idea of renaming our classified ads ‘efforts,’ and marketed them to students and community members to show their support for the paper.

By doing this, Christian raised thousands of dollars and covered almost an entire page of one of our papers with tiny, one-inch ads. We also had more trickling in after we turned in that paper, and in the next paper, filled about half a page with them.

Christian will now be moving on from the paper and focusing on his music education degree and student teaching…

And the ad manager job just got a lot less magical.