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Glu-Lam-Log Receives National Exposure
 by Phil Alman
Homes featured in three national publications.
These days it’s getting harder and harder to tell one log home magazine from another. In fact, I recently laid out several issues of each of the four major publications on our conference room table, making sure to hide the titles. Then I asked one of the magazines’ representatives, who happened to be visiting with me, to pick out the issues of her magazine. I wasn’t surprised when she couldn’t do it.
Although this little exercise was done in good humor, I was not playing a game. I was trying to prove a point...that it’s very hard to differentiate between the magazines and that readers themselves often can’t distinguish one publication from another.
In the interest of figuring out where it’s best to spend our advertising dollars, every time a new potential client calls, we ask the same question.
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Articles featuring Glu-Lam-Log homes appeared in Log Home Living, Country’s Best Log Homes, and Log Home Design Ideas.
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“Where did you hear about us?” A typical response is, “In log home magazines.” When we ask which one, they seldom can answer us specifically. To someone like me, who’s responsible for placing ads, that’s a real problem. It indicates that there’s overlap between the publications and it tells me that readers don’t have a strong preference for which magazine they read. With four major publications out there, each having half a dozen or more issues that are promptly removed from newsstands after a month or two of display, it can take a lot of ad insertions to get recognized. At $10,000 or more to produce and place a new ad, that can be pretty expensive. So, we’ve decided to leave that approach to the big guys. That’s not to say that we won’t use space advertising as an element of our promotional program, but it does tell us that we’ve got to find better, more economic methods for reaching our audiences.
One benefit of having multiple publications with multiple issues serving the market is that there are lots and lots of pages that have to be filled each year. As a result, editors are constantly in search of material to fill future issues. All it takes is a good looking house, a story line, and excellent pictures, taken by a well-known photographer and the chances of landing a feature story are pretty good. For less money than it takes to produce and place one full page color ad, you end up with a third party article that occupies five or six pages of space and displays as many as a dozen pictures of homes. As an added bonus, you can also produce color reprints of the articles. By co-oping reprint costs with us, dealers such as Spring Custom Log Homes in Spring, Texas and Modern Log Homes in Golden, Colorado have ended up with extremely economical promotional brochures that feature homes they built with our logs.
In the last two years Glu-Lam-Log has placed three such articles in Log Home Living, Log Home Design Ideas, and Country’s Best Log Homes and we intend to sponsor an average of two such stories each year.
If any of you have built homes with our logs that you think might qualify for consideration as feature stories, please call me directly. Getting a home featured in a major national publication means almost certain business for you.
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