Toronto’s Blue Ant Media has partnered with western-based publisher Keywest Marketing to create Canada’s largest publishing firm devoted to the outdoor lifestyle. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The new joint-venture company will be known as Outdoor Media Group. It will house several of Canada’s leading outdoor titles, including Blue Ant’s Outdoor Canada, along with KeyWest’s BC Outdoors, Western Sportsman and Outdoor Edge.
The company will provide advertisers with a subscriber base of 200,000 and a total reach of approximately 2.7 million outdoor enthusiasts.
Terry Sellwood, president of Blue Ant’s Cottage Life Media division, said the deal had its origins in a 2012 transaction that saw Cottage Life Media swap its outdoor title Explore for KeyWest’s Cottage magazine. Cottage Life Media has continued to handle ad sales for Explore from its Toronto office ever since.
“We’ve dealt with them for the past two years,” said Sellwood. “Obviously we trust each other and the deal went very well.” Talks surrounding this week’s deal date back almost a year, but began heating up during the summer, he said.
“It’s interesting times for traditional media, and you’re always talking to people about various opportunities,” he said. “They were serving the Western market, we were trying to serve all of Canada, and having feet on the ground in all different parts of the country is hard to do in this day and age.”
Sellwood said the deal provides advertisers with a one-call solution for buying titles such as BC Outdoors as well as Outdoor Canada’s Western and Eastern editions. “It’s efficient for them, it’s going to be efficient for us to deliver the information to readers in the region in which they live,” he said.
The partnership enables Blue Ant to maintain a foothold in the outdoor vertical – something that is not currently part of the company’s core strategy – while exploring other growth opportunities, said Sellwood.
“[Blue Ant] didn’t want to give it up, but they didn’t want to specialize in it because they have the other things they’re building,” he told Marketing. “It just became a matter of keeping half of it and letting the publisher of these other magazines take it forward without losing a stake in it.”
Sellwood and fellow Cottage Life Media executive Al Zikovitz will sit on Outdoor Media Group’s board of directors, along with KeyWest Marketing president Mark Yelic.
Blue Ant has transformed Cottage Life into a multi-platform brand since acquiring a minority stake in its parent company Quarto Communications in 2011 (the company rebranded as Cottage Life Media in April 2012, and was acquired outright by Blue Ant later that year).
Cottage Life launched its own specialty channel, Cottage Life TV, in August 2013, and also has four consumer shows. Keywest, meanwhile, currently co-produces B.C.-based fishing shows that air in both Canada and the U.S.
Sellwood said it’s possible that other brands within the Outdoor Media Group assets could see similar brand extensions. “With this kind of critical mass [it] is entirely within the realm of possibility,” he said. “It gives us a bigger footprint on which to build for the future.”
