Ex-Hanley Wood Employee Launches Online Shelter Network

Daniel Meehan, a former Hanley Wood and Penton Media staffer, has launched Haven Home Media, an Internet media play looking to deliver new marketing opportunities to national brand advertisers in the shelter category.

“The opportunity was crystallized for me when looking at online audience research,” Haven Home Media’s president and CEO Daniel Meehan told FOLIO: recently. The top 10 home and garden Internet sites by size reach less than 40 percent of the overall online audience, he said, with 60 percent of the audience served by more than 250 independent Web sites. “It’s really a simple case of media fragmentation.”

As marketers look for new ways to efficiently reach “in-market” buyers of home improvement products, Meehan thinks this new vertical media model will be embraced. “I expect more large brands to start taking portions of their budgets from more established media partners like Scripps, Meredith, AOL, iVillage and Time, and test our programs,” he said.

Where this “untapped business” is remains to be seen, as shelter magazines and home improvement publications have been particularly hard hit—reeling from the shutterings of Domino, House Beautiful and Country Home.
 
But Meehan sees potential in this suffering market, positioning Haven Home Media as a “one-stop source for marketers in the home and garden market.”

This includes online extensions of two nationally syndicated home improvement television programs, a nationally syndicated home improvement radio program, a high-end home design site with a 700,000 product database, a landscaping and gardening site with more than 400,000 registered members, and a site focused on eco-friendly home renovation and energy.

Meehan launched the company on January 12 with a small amount of private funding, and expects to break even by third quarter of 2009. “We’re purposely running an extremely lean organization in which the vast majority of our efforts and resources are focused on driving immediate sales revenue and cash flow; two essential life-bloods of any new company.”

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