The 18th Day of Community: Sam Van Eman

I can’t recall when exactly I started following Sam Van Eman’s blog New Breed of Advertisers, but judging by where it falls on my RSS feed, it’s been at least several years.

Sam works for CCOJubliee, a campus ministry involved in colleges and universities all over the United States that seeks to develop young men and women to live out their faith in all areas of life. He is also the author of On Earth as It Is in Advertising: Moving from Commercial Hype to Gospel Hope, in which he discussed the negative messages of advertising and contrasted them with the positive messages of the gospel.

He calls himself both a “critic and a fan of advertising,” and he places advertising squarely in the midst of the concept of being a neighbor, as he describes on his blog: “You're good at what you do. You study and listen and read - honing your trade - only to understandably and occasionally forget that behind the progress toward success are real neighbors consuming your work. So you must ask - and keep asking - not the myopic, ‘How can I get customers to fall in love with my product?" but a more generous, "How can I love by getting this product to my customers?’"

It’s that belief, and how he writes about it, that first pulled me into New Breed of Advertisers, and kept me there. It doesn’t matter whether the subject is an ad about soup or Volkswagen or the NCAA, he takes the same insightful look, grounded in faith, and then looks at what the ad is really communicating.

Sam is also a content editor for The High Calling Blogs, focusing on the area of culture.

So check out New Breed of Advertisers. For someone like me, with a background in corporate communications, his blog and his writing in general provide the background story of familiar territory.


(In December, a number of us participating in the “Twelve Days of Community” - see the button at the top right - sponsored by The High Calling Blogs. The purpose was to highlight the blog or web site of someone other than ourselves during the season of Advent and Christmas. I liked the idea so much that I’m going to continue to do that -- highlight a blog or web site of a person whose thoughts and writing have had an impact on me and others.)