Ads, ads, ads

One of the great things about being in the USTA Comm Department is I am surrounded by really smart and talented people, and today we sat down for a two hour discussion on advertising, and how we can better serve the advertisers we have and, hopefully, entice more to our pages to benefit our readers.

Most magazines need advertising to survive, and Hoof Beats is no different. The challenges, though, grow greater every day, as advertisers seek to spend their money the best way possible.

When I first started in magazines—and before that, newspapers—advertising and editorial were completely separate. Sometimes they were even openly hostile. That is certainly not the case at Hoof Beats. We know editorial and advertising go hand in hand, and we greatly value story suggestions made by our advertisers (Art Zubrod of Brittany Farms, for example, pitched us on hyperbaric chambers after his dog was put in one).

Our meeting today was broad, wrapping our brains around the several different forms of advertising that we are fortunate to now offer come with our new multi-media push. We have video commercials, e-newsletters, blogs, marketing messages, etc. All our research shows that advertisers are best served by a multi-media approach—print, Web, visual electronics. That gets your message across to as many people as possible, since buyers receive messages in different ways. We are excited to be able to offer these new ad venues because we are sure they will really be a benefit to all our advertisers.

But we also appreciate everyone who has stayed with our beloved print and Web products for all these years, and we are looking for ways to thank them through additional exposure. To that end we are developing what the ad business calls “value-added advertising.” We call it free ads, which we will give away to our best and longtime customers as a way of saying, “thanks”.

If you have any story ideas, please contact me at nkraft@ustrotting.com. And if you have any advertising needs, Heather Dodds at heather.dodds@ustrotting.com is here to work for you. We’d love to hear from you!

Nicole