My colleague and buddy, Christopher Martin, is an unsung hero here at Quality Digest. Few of our readers know him, but all our advertisers do, because he’s the guy who keeps them happy.

In addition to being a great salesperson, Christopher handles ad materials, tracking, reportage, traffic coordination, and scheduling, to name just a few. Furthermore, Christopher has forgotten more about the technical intricacies of web design and analytics than I’ll ever know, and he laughs at my jokes to boot. He’s a true Renaissance man.

Like me, Christopher sometimes writes rather lengthy emails. That makes sense, because he’s always got a lot going on at any one time with any number of individual clients, and recapping all the details and making sure that everyone is on the same page often takes a couple of hundred words. And inevitably, following one of our particularly involved stem-winders, we’ll get the same response:

“Thanks.” Or, sometimes, if we catch a particularly ebullient client in a particularly effusive mood, we might get, “Thanks!” That exclamation point makes all the difference.

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