Meet Social Magazine Publishers, Andrew and Heather Vreeland
Andrew and Heather Vreeland are the brains behind the Social Magazines franchise. The two have worked together since the beginning to create magazines that stand out in an ever changing media environment. Today we sat down with them to get a glimpse into the history of their work and learn how the Social Magazines concept has evolved overtime and where it’s going next.
Where did you both go to college and what did you get degrees in?
Heather graduated from Flagler College with a Bachelor of Arts in Communication and Andrew graduated from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University with a Bachelor of Science in Air Traffic Management.
Have you always lived in St. Augustine?
Heather was born and raised in West Palm Beach, FL and moved to St. AUgustine in 2001 to go to Flagler College. Andrew moved to St. Augustine in 1987 with his family. We met in 2005 in St. Augustine, married in 2006 and moved to Atlanta to start our careers. We moved back to St. Augustine in 2013 after living in Atlanta for 8 years for Andrew’s career as an Air Traffic Controller with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Andrew was able to transfer to JAX in 2013 where he controlled air traffic until 2015 when we decided to add SOCIAL Magazine to our business. Our goal was to return to St. Augustine when the opportunity presented itself. In 2013 Andrew’s work allowed for it.
Tell me about your and Andrew’s past experiences in publishing and editorial?
Neither of us has any formal publishing experience. I was a communication major at Flagler College with a focus in broadcast journalism. I realized in my senior year that I was not interested in being a TV anchor, so a professor recommended I learn the business side of news media and intern with the research department WJXT Channel 4 News. I remember the first week on the job, reviewing the Nielsen ratings each morning thinking to myself "Wow! They should really tell businesses about these stations that get the most viewers so they can advertise on them!" and my supervisor said.... "you should intern in the sales department next" and so I did.
After college, I never found a job in TV sales, but my part-time college job as a receptionist at Debbie's Day Spa and Salon turned into a full-time opportunity when the owner approached me about staying on and taking over her marketing. In that position I gained a lot of insight in the buying seat of our advertising. I experienced the perspective of the business needing to get the word out, but not truly trusting the current advertising that was available to me at the time. That’s what gave me the idea of opening a city magazine initially. I knew what we wanted, so I created it… eventually.
Andrew is good with numbers and obsesses over efficiency. Every business needs that, and magazine businesses need that twice!
Tell me a little bit about the wedding magazine you owned?
Occasions Magazine was the magazine for celebrating in style that we launched in 2008. A glossy, coffee-table style book featuring weddings, parties, bar/bat mitzvahs and galas all across Metro Atlanta. It was the top wedding and party magazine at the time and sold in all major magazine retailers. That grew to cover 11 cities in Georgia and Florida, and evolved to be known as The Celebration Society and after the sale in 2017 to a new publisher, Atlanta Style Weddings and Chicago Style Weddings.
In 2017 we won Best Website from the Florida Magazine Association (FMA). The print magazine always generated a majority of the revenue, but after years of development and SEO work, plus a commitment to pay for digital advertising, we had the traffic and revenue from online profile advertising (think wedding wire), that we were able to sell a complete package to a larger publisher looking for a ready made digital package. They are still using the same website over 6 years later.
Why did you start St. Augustine Social?
When we returned to St. Augustine in 2013 it reignited that original idea for a city magazine, but now with knowledge and experience working in our favor. Money too. There was already a city magazine in town and we made an offer to purchase, but they declined. Within weeks we launched SOCIAL’s website and associated social media and went to work selling advertising for a print magazine that didn’t exist. The first Dec/Jan issue was published in 2014/15, we haven’t missed one yet. We ended up buying out that original magazine 4 years later.
What was the publishing model for St. Augustine Social?
Originally we launched St. Augustine Social as a traditional city magazine with 112 pages and a 50/50 advertising to editorial ratio. It was subscription/controlled distribution based. Sold in all major retailers across St. Augustine and Jacksonville, with controlled-commercial distribution at popular coffee shops and retailers throughout St. Augustine, and direct mailed to a rotating route of 1,500 homes/businesses for free per issue.
The key component was a maximum of 10,000 copies per issue. Then make up any shortcomings reach-wise with digital components. 95% of revenue came from print advertisers.
The original format worked for St. Augustine proper, but 10,000 copies didn’t go far enough for many of our advertisers looking to reach further out. We had to increase our reach to the entire county. We used paid digital advertising to increase our “reach,” but at a certain point that money invested becomes counterproductive.
Our choice was to double advertising rates to pay for more magazines and distribution. That gets us to maybe 30,000 copies…still not enough, and who wants to pay twice as much? We needed to get to 100,000 copies per issue to saturate the entire county. That project started in 2019.
How did you come up with this new, direct-mail model for Social Magazines?
After we acquired Old City Life and merged it with St. Augustine Social in 2018, we were looking to grow. We considered a secondary product to our lineup that our sales team could offer clients, like a tourist publication, but didn’t like the distribution model. We’ve always admired the power of direct mail, but a 112 page magazine (think weight) is basically impossible to mail to every home/business in the county.
Eventually some know-it-all in the office piped up and said “We could turn it into a glorified coupon boo.k” Then someone else jumped in and said what about a” lighter version of St. Augustine Social”. All at once SOCIALite was born.
The new SOCIALite would publish every other month, in between SOCIAL’s regular bi-mohtly schedule. We now had a plan to publish monthly, with SOCIALite being directly mailed to over 35,000 homes and businesses from day one, to start.
The first issue of SOCIALite was scheduled to publish in May 2020. The April issue of SOCIAL was already published and distributed as the shutdowns began from COVID. As May approached we understood the shutdown might last longer than a month or two, so we reached out to every advertiser and gave them the chance to move their advertising wholly to SOCIALite and benefit from being mailed directly to everyone’s home, or risk our June issue of SOCIAL being canceled.
Why did you rebrand to Social Magazines?
Social Magazines was really the backend goal all along. We knew we wanted to get the magazine to a point where it could be replicated in different markets. Then simply drop the market’s name in the masthead. So, St. Augustine SOCIAL is still the name here and St. Johns SOCIAL is what people in the northside of the county know it as.
Now that it’s a direct mailed magazine, what makes it different from other direct mail magazines residents already get? Like Money Pages or Mint Magazine?
SOCIAL’s model takes the best part of direct mailed coupon books like Money Pages and Mint Magazine (distribution), the best part of a city magazine (design), and puts them together. Truly it is the direct mail part that makes the difference. Money Pages and Mint Magazine have shown that for decades. If you mail 50,000 of something, it will make an impact guaranteed.
SOCIAL stands out from other direct mailers because it’s designed as a city magazine with relevant community related content first.
You’ve expanded to include St. Augustine and St. Johns issues. What are some other areas that you plan on expanding to?
Basically any market in the Southeast that has 50,000 households or more within their county. For comparison, St. Johns County has 96,000 households (households being a dwelling with 2 or more people living in it). SOCIAL mails to almost 100% of our county's households each issue, plus every brick and mortar business.
Around how much do ads cost?
A classic Ad averages $875 for a half page, per issue. SOCIAL’s content ads average $900 for a half page and $1,650 for a full page story, per issue. Simple math tells us $875 / 50,000 addresses = $0.017 cents per address, just under 2 cents per address. In our experience for both print and digital marketing, there is no other media that can come close to that figure.
A typical direct mail postcard of similar size will run 18 cents per address or $9,000 to reach 50,000 addresses. Same is true for Facebook/Instagram paid advertisements or paid Google ads. Understandably these types of ads are all about one particular business, which should have an equally worthwhile ROI. SOCIAL Magazine provides a higher ROI compared to the price of each ad with less financial and time investment.
How has growth been?
SOCIAL’s revenue increased by 115% since moving to a direct mail model. Much of that growth occurred within the first 12 months. A clear sign.
Most importantly our distribution exploded. SOCIAL went from 10,000 copies per issue, randomly distributed throughout town, to 104,000+ copies distributed directly to mailboxes per issue. An increase of 940%.
Why is this model so beneficial for the advertiser?
The direct mail model increased our advertiser’s exposure by almost 1,000%. The results were immediate for every advertiser. This exposure builds new word-of-mouth business quickly and the two work hand-in-hand.
Equally as important, maybe more so, is the fact that SOCIAL now provides a delivery receipt from the Post Office that shows how many magazines they received from our printer AND how much we paid for postage to mail the magazines. We haven’t found a single other marketing resource that so willingly provides this information to advertisers.
“If you do everything right, transparency is the answer.”
You also don’t really have a digital or social media presence. Why did you make that decision? Are you “leaving money on the table” by not offering digital ads?
Yes, we leave money on the table by not offering digital advertising. In our experience there are 2 types of digital markets. Local and Regional/National. Our regional wedding magazine website generated 6 figures a year in digital advertising.
At the same time, our local magazines website generated about $15-25,000 a year. We implemented heavy SEO strategies on our website and sponsored each social media post we made to ensure lots of people saw it and engaged in some way. On average we spent $12,000 a year in Facebook/Instagram/Google ads to generate $20,000 in digital advertising. Factor out several thousand in commissions, and thousands more in web development, and all we got in return were the occasional nasty comments on the internet. We classify money like this as…Not all money is good money. In this case we’ll leave the bad (for us) money for someone else to pick up.
What do you say to someone who says “print is dead”?
We’ve been hearing it for 15 years, since the onset of Social media, blogs, and websites. Through those years, when we asked clients if they would rather be featured in the print magazine or on the website alone, they pick the magazine.
The internet has removed every barrier to entry to “publishing” content. Anyone can start a website/blog and create an associated social media account and then click “Post”. And so, almost everyone has done that!
Forbes research shows, 1.13 Billion websites exist as of 2023. Now for the kicker. 82% of those websites are now inactive (dead). Meaning just 18% of the websites clogging up the internet are alive. Further, of those 18% of active websites, only a fraction of them are truly thriving i.e. generating large amounts of traffic and therefore able to command meaningful amounts of advertising opportunities. These are dismal statistics. So digital is 82% dead and each new magazine is 100% alive, no?
On a local level however, print done the SOCIAL way, with zero digital content/ads, generates 40X the revenue per year as our previous digital component ever could in our local market. We deliver 18 pallets of magazines to the post office each issue (an entire 18-wheeler). It’s unbelievable even to us. We know most our advertisers don’t fully grasp the scale.
Said another way, I know of at least 8 direct mail products in our region who generate millions upon millions of dollars per year, each. I can’t name one digital (website, facebook group, blog, or influencer) who generates much more than $50k a year by offering legit advertising for local businesses.
So it depends on who we are talking to as to how we answer.
What advice do you give other print publishers, editors, and writers?
I wish there was more help we could offer, but none of it matters if the publisher doesn’t prove their distribution.
Circulation is all that matters. Eventually the advertisers will figure that out too.
Most periodical media kits read like this:
50% Male 50% Female
College Educated
$150,000+ household incomes
A long list of “high traffic” distribution locations around town, with no mention of how many copies are placed at each location.
If some are mailed, catch phrases like “majority”, “homes valued $500,000+”, or “affluent” are used, but no mention of exactly how many addresses the publisher is paying the Post Office to deliver to.
Some go as far to say readership is 50,000 an issue,1 million a year, etc. They’ll also include their social media channels and present them as gospel that their 15,000 followers see every post they make. Reality is maybe only 150 people see a particular post and then the same 2,3,4, or 20 people like and comment over and over again.
All of this is designed to do one thing… Make the advertiser think more people are going to see their ad than is actually true. The real number of actual readers is more often than not 90% less than what is depicted.
It’s these types of practices that do permanent damage to an industry. If you do this, print is dead, for you and your advertisers.
SOCIAL’s media kit reads like this:
52,640 direct mailed to St. Augustine addresses
43,520 direct mailed to St. Johns addresses
25,723 direct mailed to Nocatee, and Ponte Vedra addresses
We follow that up by emailing the paid receipt we get from the USPS each issue to our advertisers.