The scene: Four executives of a company sit at a long table. “Ms. Beisenhirtz, please send in the next candidate.” Enter a young woman, sneakers and a colorful dress, talking into her phone: “You know I got 25k on Insta, right? Do you know who’s following me? Celebrities, baby, celebrities.” She gets off the phone and tells the panel to wait a moment and if they could move in closer for her selfie. They acquiesce.   She tags them on social media and then says, “Sorry I don’t usually tag people under 15k.” She sits down and is now all business. "All cell phones off and everyone look over here. I brought a concept. Hand this out please but don’t look at it yet! First of all, only one thing matters to me: Sell. Sell. Sell. High-quality products for the benefit of the customer.” She tells them how many “A-list” followers she has and says, “Now l ...

In his 2019 SIPAward-winning entry for Best Use of Video in Marketing, Behr's Verlag CEO Arno Langbehn wrote that it was a coincidence that as he played the accordion at the port of Hamburg—yes, really—and then started talking up their Annual Conference QM!, a cargo ship moved across the background named "RELIABLE."

We've talked a lot here about the importance of building communities within your audience. I was just reading a press release from the National Fastpitch (Softball) Coaches Association announcing the fourth straight year they're doing their Power of One membership drive. The campaign has resulted in more than 450 new members.

The International Security Conference & Exposition, which will take place in November in New York City, is using an interactive quiz to both personalize an attendee's onsite event experience and convince people to attend.

Focus on customers and not ourselves, Arno Langbehn, CEO, B. Behr's Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, told us in a Pre-Conference Workshop titled Extraordinary Examples for Marketing, Product Development and Sales and How to Implement Them Successfully Into Your Publishing House at SIPA 2019 last month. That video is now posted here—it also includes Kiplinger President Denise Elliott and marketing director Chris Moffa talking about emails and renewals.

In a well-attended Pre-Con Workshop on Day One of SIPA Annual 2019, Arno Langbehn, CEO, B. Behr's Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, covered Steve Jobs—"It's not the customer's job to know what he wants"—superheroes (well, kind of, "The hero is the customer," Langbehn said)—Groundhog Day (the film and the idea of using the information that you know to sell)—and ponchos ($5 when dry, $20 when it's raining—strike when something's hot). 

Superheroes may be all the rage now, but in publishing, Arno Langbehn, CEO of Behr's GmbH in Hamburg, Germany, wants to make sure the roles are correct.

"For our annual quality management conference, we successfully tested a new form of advertising: We sent a personal video to the participants of the last two years who had not yet registered," Arno Langbehn, CEO of Behr's GmbH in Hamburg, Germany, told me recently. "The result was 30 videos sent, three registrations and $6,000 in revenue from these former participants. The time expenditure in total was two hours."

Hollywood has their Oscars, and we have our SIPAwards.  And although they've held a few more than we have—91 to 40—we plan on having a host at our celebration this year (June 4). And if we had five nominated songs, we would showcase them all. (I did write about one cool publishing song last week.)

Editor's note: This is the fifth of an ongoing series profiling the 2018 SIPAward winners. See links to the others below.