Seth and I decided that magazine publishers would be a great partner for us. The magazines had tons of female subscribers and no real rewards or loyalty programs to offer them. Some have credit cards and the like, but we think we’ve got something unique. I started doing my research about a month ago on the top publishers and came up with a pretty short list. Conde Nast, Meredith Corp, Rodale, Time Inc., Hearst and Dennis Publishing were at the top. I decided to focus on these guys and start networking into the organizations to speak with somebody in sales or marketing for some of the well-known magazines. While doing my research on each of the publisher’s websites, I realized that they provided lots of contacts for their advertising personnel, since that’s the primary way they make money by selling ads in the magazines. I thought that this was a pretty good place to start since I could narrow my search to ad sales personnel by magazine. I made a list of names from the websites (most of which gave names, emails and phone numbers) and started smiling and dialing.Most of the emails I sent were never answered. There were, however, a few bites. I managed to set up a call with a couple people from ad sales at Stuff Magazine for last week in July. I’m not sure that they are the right crowd to discuss a subscriber rewards program. But we’ll just have to see. I’ll probably follow-up with the 150-odd people I contacted this week over the next month or two to see if there are any new bites. I’ll keep you posted… JT
