Meals on wheels - Cooking Light magazine promotion

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, May 15, 1993 by Ruth Bayard Smith

Warm with success, Cooking Light is taking its show on the road with a truckload of promotions in tow.

When Cooking Light was launched six years ago, the time seemed ripe to capitalize on the public's growing interest in lighter foods, fitness and an overall healthier lifestyle. But today, even Cooking Light publisher Jeff Ward acknowledges that the market has turned out to be larger than many people in the publishing industry expected. "A healthy magazine was viewed as trendy," he says. "I think they believed people might feel this way |for a period of time~, but then they'd go back to being couch potatoes."

Cooking Light has, of course, proven the skeptics wrong. The magazine--"cash profitable" almost from the start, according to Ward--has grown its initial circulation of 450,000 to one million, and its ad pages from 236 in 1988 to 505 in 1992. Published seven times a year (bimonthly with a special holiday issue) by the Southern Progress Corporation, a division of Time Warner based in Birmingham, Alabama, Cooking Light has made Adweek's list of hottest magazines for the past three years. Last year, the title was named one of six best magazines by Advertising Age, while earning a spot on the top-10 list of performers in "Capell's Circulation Report" newsletter.

"I don't think they've seen the tip of the iceberg," Ward says of any nay-sayers who may remain.

Over the next six months, however, it will be very hard not to notice Cooking Light--thanks to the magazine's new traveling road show. The "Ask Cooking Light" mobile magazine tour is a marketing vehicle in the most literal sense: It uses a 48-foot converted tractor-trailer housing 10 topic-specific kiosks to dispense samples, recipes, coupons and nutrition and health information to consumers at participating retail sites across the country.

The promotion, which visits 40 communities, kicked off May 1 in San Diego. It will wend its way through the West, and then come through the Midwest, the Northeast and Southeast before finishing up with a stop in Flagstaff, Arizona, at the end of October. Along the way, it will set up shop in the parking lots of malls, schools and supermarkets, including Safeway, Kroger, D'Agostino, Publix, Albertsons, Dominicks and King's. The magazine has signed on 10 sponsors, including Reynolds Plastic Wrap, WASA Crispbread, Mott's Apple Sauce, Conagra's Healthy Choice and Stouffer's Lean Cuisine.

Overseeing the promotion is Mark Dodge, a former Time Inc. executive who now heads Integrated Marketing Services in New York City. Dodge has signed on a Michigan-based company called Mallworks to staff the show (which also will include a photo-filled bimonthly newsletter of tour highlights published for sponsors and participating supermarkets). Ads for the tour, listing the different dates and locations, are running in both Cooking Light and People. And at various stops across the country, Cooking Light editors will be on hand to answer questions.

"'Ask Cooking Light' relates strongly to what the magazine is all about," says Ward, who unabashedly describes the mobile promotion as "very low tech." The idea is to reflect the publication's contents by serving up information on such subjects as kids' fitness, microwave cooking and the preparation of smart breakfasts, salads and baked goods. "We expect to get an enormous amount of publicity in each of the markets, from food editors to local television outlets," Ward continues. "We think we'll create a lot of consumer awareness and increase the magazine's credibility. It's also going to help create a bond with retailers."

All that attention isn't likely to hurt Cooking Light's growing ad base, either. The tour is expected to draw on the same demographic audience the magazine serves: women (81 percent of readers are female), 45 years old, college educated and earning a median household income of about $43,000. "It doesn't surprise me that the bulk of our readers are women," says editor Katherine Eakin. "Women have direct influence on their spouses on lifestyle and health issues."

That factor has helped the magazine attract a range of advertisers beyond the healthy foods category, including automotive, financial services, sporting goods and drugs/remedies. Generally, ad pages are almost equally divided between food and non-food products; in the March/April issue, for example, 35 of 80 ad pages were devoted to food.

For a product like Dannon Light yogurt, Cooking Light makes a lot of sense, says Debra Goodman, associate media director at Grey Advertising, which handles the Dannon account. "The interests of the Dannon consumer and someone who would read Cooking Light are parallel," she notes. "One of the things we're interested in at Dannon is to find healthy ways to use our products in recipes."

But what goes into the decision to advertise such non-food products as the Ford Taurus and other family cars in Cooking Light? "It's very simple," explains Dick Halseth, media manager, Ford Division/Ford Motor Company. "What it brings to us is a large station-wagon audience. The magazine has an upper income level and a higher education level. These are good demographics to us." Typically, each issue of Cooking Light includes a one- or two-page Ford spread touting the Taurus. In addition, last fall Ford sponsored a special eight-page advertising section geared to the tailgating crowd. Recipes for salads, "healthy heros" and reduced-calorie brownies were featured in the text.