Living Life in Platform Neutral

Andrew Weber, president and CEO of Farm Journal Media, holds a firm mental blueprint of his company’s goals and mission for the future—a blueprint that reflects the continued utilization and advancement of the company’s multimedia platforms. Farm Journal Media develops cross-platform editorial content to cover any subject important to farmers and ranchers. Weber understands that content delivery methods are crucial, because when your content is delivered in a way that is inconvenient and unreliable to your customer, your content means nothing.

And he practices what he preaches. Farm Journal is not only growing its digital products significantly—from the Web to TV—but its print delivery method is quite unique. The magazine has been a pioneer in personalized publishing, developing reader demographics and tailoring issue versions to specific readers’ interests.

“The magazine routinely publishes 1,500 to 2,000 different versions monthly and has published up to 10,000 different versions of one issue,” says Weber. “To this day, it is the most complex magazine produced in the world, with a circulation of 440,000 and readership of 1.1 million farmers.”

Giving Readers What
They Want

Farm Journal Media—a mid-size business-to-business company based in Philadelphia—is open to operating in any medium.

“We are platform neutral, and will do … everything possible to give our million farmers and ranchers important information in whatever content or medium they want,” Weber says.

“Over my 30 years in this business, I’ve seen b-to-b publishing migrate from a magazine business to a media business, and now to an information business. Those who haven’t followed this path have struggled or not survived,” he says. “We recognize that consumers of media have different preferences for different delivery platforms … so we’ll deliver important information such as new legislation, new technology, etc., in integrated multimedia formats [such as] magazines (including digital), TV, Internet, live events, direct mail, telephone, etc.,” he says.