Giant Steps are What We Take...Walking on the Moon!

Innovate or die.  This is the mantra we live by.  Asheboro and More Marketing was founded in January of 2011, but there is so much more to the story.  This timeline represents our journey, long before Asheboro and More Marketing existed.  You will see that, although our name and focus has changed over the year, the destination was evident and we are exactly where we are supposed to be.

Dave Johnson, Founder and CCO (Chief Creative Officer) started his marketing career in June of 1990 working for an oldies radio station, Oldies 107.5 in Portland, ME.  It was there he first used his innovative approach to marketing to become the stations top performer. He went on to become the top performer while selling television, newspaper, direct mail and yellow page advertising. He accomplished this by always putting his client's needs first and not settling for the status quo.

That is what they called it when it first came online.  Dave began building websites back when you accessed the Internet with a dial-up modem. He combined traditional advertising with his knowledge of the Internet to start DNS advertising in Saco, ME. Along with offering traditional advertising agency services, it was here where Dave and his team began selling and developing websites to small and medium sized businesses.

It was during this time that Dave discovered Community Publications.  He went to work for a community publication in Dover-Foxcroft, ME, (an area where Paul Bunyan may have swung is ax). There Dave used his cutting-edge (pun intended) marketing ideas and his growing knowledge of the Internet to help small business owners get the most from their advertising investment.

The internet began to really take off and Dave saw the writing on the wall.  He began learning everything he could about online marketing, e-commerce and was a power seller on eBay before most people knew what it was.  He also had accounts with X.com (the online payment gateway created by Elon Musk that became PayPal) and Godaddy.com early after they came online. During this time, he started a company called The Beanie Broker where he bought and sold hard-to-find Beanie Babies online.  When he told his mother-in-law what he was doing, she told him to get a job even though he was making a 6-figures in the comfort of his home office.

On 9/11/2001 Dave was working for a regional technology publication. One of the things he noticed was most of the "tech" companies were making a grave marketing mistake - they were naming their services things that a regular person wouldn't understand.  This simple concept was preventing the majority of his clients from realizing their true potential.  Shortly after 9/11, the client's that had adopted Dave's philosophy and changed the names of their services so they were easily understood, came out virtually unscathed.  Those that didn't became part of the carnage known as the DOT.BOMB.

During this time, the Internet was started to make some serious headway.  Craigslist was becoming the giant they are today and traditional newspapers where trying to decide whether to take the Internet serious or whether it was a dying fad.  Dave was working for a large newspaper group at the time and recalls the day in a senior staff meeting when the publisher announced that the Internet was a fad and that they were not going to do anything different.  "People will always read the newspaper", he said. Dave resigned shortly thereafter because he knew, from first-hand experience, the Internet was going to be HUGE.  Two years later, it became evident to the publisher and the rest of the senior staff that they had missed the boat when the newspaper lost 60% of its classified revenue to the fad.  

Although the early adopters had proven that selling cars online was the next step in the automotive industry's evolution, many dealers held out for the higher margins they had become accustomed to. Dave worked for Cars.com during this time and watched the early adopters crush the dealerships that were not willing to change. Many of the car dealers that didn't get on board early are still struggling today.  Some even went out of business.

Asheboro and More Marketing was born with their major project being Asheboro Magazine, an upbeat, positive, hyper-local community magazine for the city of Asheboro, North Carolina.  From this launch pad, Asheboro and More Marketing, along with publishing a magazine, developed websites, managed Facebook pages in the "early day" and developed a training program to teach others how to publish community magazines.  Asheboro and More Marketing was one of the original electronic magazine publishers.