Hanley-Wood does a BIG TRUCKIN' DEAL

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, March 1, 2003 by Jill Andresky Fraser

Byline: Jill Andresky Fraser

Most business-to-business media companies are trying to pursue multiplatform advertising deals, the bigger the better. So to the outside world it might not have looked like anything particularly revolutionary when Hanley-Wood, a publisher serving the housing and construction industries, said in the fall of 2001 that it intended to raise the bar, corporately speaking, by significantly boosting the revenue from at least one big advertiser. Further, the company said this would require a comprehensive initiative that would cut across all of its divisional lines, basically reinventing what they could deliver to their customers.

Here's the surprise, though: The strategy worked. Hanley-Wood landed a deal with Dodge Trucks that catapulted the DaimlerChrysler unit from a $200,000 customer to a $3 million customer - a large piece of business for the Washington, D.C.-based publisher. Hanley-Wood's officers say they hope their experience with Dodge offers some useful lessons for the rest of the b-to-b marketplace.

Although a lot of trade books have tried this kind of tie-up with major consumer advertisers, they haven't had much success, points out Paul Mackler, president and CEO of Cygnus Business Media (who also emphasizes that he's unfamiliar with the specifics of the Dodge deal). "Consumer advertisers are usually looking for big volume, which b-to-b titles, by their very nature, don't offer - unless you bundle them together, at which point you generally have got very different demographics across industry lines," Mackler says. That's a hurdle, regardless of whether the advertising market is weak, as it's been in recent years, or strong. "You might try to convince a consumer advertiser that, regardless of the industry, all your readers are going to buy cereal, but the fact is, they're reading your magazines for professional tools and strategies, not breakfast-shopping tips."

What Hanley-Wood had going for it across all five of its operating divisions (b-to-b magazines, trade shows, custom marketing, consumer publishing, and interactive) was unusually coherent concentration on one huge industry - residential construction - that had held up nicely during the economic downturn. This offered at least the potential for a tightly focused media buy.

Nearly 18 months ago, Frank Anton, president of the $160 million (sales) company, met for the better part of a day with Jack Brannigan, one of his executive vice presidents. (Both men are among the executive group that owns small partnership stakes in the company, along with VS&A Communications Partners III.) "We drew up a list of 15 to 20 accounts and said, 'These guys could spend money on every one of our business lines.' They were either already large customers or we thought they could be," Anton recalls. "One characteristic they all shared was, they all had a large stake in the construction business, whether as retailers or as suppliers of equipment."

Brannigan took over total control of the project. "He worked his way down that list," Anton explains. "In most cases, we chose companies where we had intimate knowledge of their operations and strong ties inside the organization." Brannigan approached these contacts by telephone, telling them that Hanley-Wood was interested in putting together a package that would cross all five of its divisions. Most companies passed.

But at Dodge, conditions were different. The company had never been a big advertiser with Hanley-Wood. ("They were maybe our 40th or 50th biggest customer," notes Anton.) However, the automaker was launching some big new trucks, and, thanks to regular reader polls, Hanley-Wood could document the affinity between construction professionals and trucks. "Through our trade shows, magazines, and other divisions, we reach the guy who's going to buy one truck and the big company that's going to need a whole fleet of them," Brannigan says. Best of all, Dodge recognized the vitality of the construction industry.

The Hanley-Wood team was looking for a big payoff, but it was nothing if not flexible. "We put together a big package with many different elements," Anton explains. (See sidebar.) "The most profitable parts of the deal, for us, were advertisements in all of our magazines with premium positioning, sponsorships at the trade shows, and Web site sponsorships. But the piece that was really the linchpin for Dodge was a nationwide tour we set up to take its trucks to construction sites, lumberyards, Home Depots, and other locations that we would get contractors to visit." An extra plus: Thanks to a truck giveaway at the end of the tour, Dodge would get a database of potential new customers, projected at more than 100,000 names.

"Hanley-Wood's holistic collection of construction-related media properties was exactly what Dodge required to help launch the 2003 Dodge Ram Heavy Duty pickup," says Matt Miller, a vice president and account supervisor for Dodge Truck communications at ad agency BBDO Detroit.

The publisher's flexibility paid off, a lesson for other b-to-b contenders in this arena. "The tour is complicated, hard, not even a source of profits for us," says Anton. "But there's no doubt that this was the big idea that made the Dodge deal happen. It really takes advertising to a whole new level when people can see and touch and climb into your product."