Yoga Journal Leverages Key Print Advertiser into Live Events

Active Interest Media, Inc. [AIM] is leveraging its live events portfolio to convert print advertisers into multi-event sponsors. Yoga Journal, which has a total paid and verified circulation of over 367,000, produces four conferences a year around the United States aimed at its core reader base.

Subaru—a longtime print advertiser—has signed on as one of the key sponsors of the conferences beginning this week at the San Diego Yoga Journal Conference.

“This is our first automotive sponsor,” says Bill Harper, vice president and group publisher of Yoga Journal. “We’ve been talking to them for a good two years or so about sponsoring our events. Having dealt with them in print for the past four or five years, we thought this would be a great opportunity to make Subaru come alive. We thought our events would be the best opportunity to bring the car to a level where people can actually see it, feel it and drive it, creating a more personal connection.”

The event website, printed material on site and banners at the conference will feature Subaru branding. Under the group’s gold sponsorship package, the sponsor gets a comprehensive campaign displayed pre-and-post show.

“They’ll get approximately 15 million impressions throughout all of our promotional materials for each of the conferences,” says Harper. “When we promote the conference to potential attendees, they’ll have a sponsorship with all of those materials—printed, bound in the magazine, email blasts—it adds up to quite a lot of media impressions.”

Depending on the conference, anywhere between 1,600 and 2,000 attendees come out for the Yoga Journal events. Normally the publication secures six to seven gold sponsors per event, meaning Subaru has heightened exposure when compared to other tiers due to the smaller pool.

Right now, the publication is looking to build an event-based relationship with Subaru and plans to negotiate for future sponsorships. When it comes to leveraging a print advertiser into an event sponsor, Harper suggests making the process simple—and worthwhile.

“We try to make it easy,” says Harper. “The mindset of the advertiser has to encompass the idea of the sponsorship. Subaru has been sponsoring a number of other events for several years so they’re predisposed to creating a sponsorship from print to events. We speak with everyone who’s in the magazine and offer to make their product come alive with our readership through events. Some are prepared to do that and some aren’t. It’s quite turnkey and pretty easy to be involved in the events so we make it as easy as possible—we understand how important it is for people to see the products, sample them and feel them.”

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