Custom Publishing Review: Healthy Pet Magazine

A Perfect Balance

Healthy Pet MagazineHave you seen Healthy Pet magazine, published by Zoasis of Huntington Beach, California? A 36-page full color magazine, Healthy Pet arrived with a personalized half-cover announcing that it’s time for Joey — my cat — to come in for a check-up. I assume I was placed on the Healthy Pet mail list by our veterinary clinic.

The magazine includes several colorful departments and five lively features, including a piece titled “Focus: Dental Health,” which not coincidentally ties in with a cover flap offer to receive “$120 OFF Dental Cleaning.” Other features cover animal behavior, holiday pet safety, and new medical technology for your animal companions.

Overall, healthy pet strikes a perfect balance by delivering useful and interesting content while purveying useful services and products. The editors of this magazine succeed in putting the readers’ interests first, in turn enhancing the magazine’s marketing effectiveness.

If I could change anything in Healthy Pet, it would be to create a Web tie-in. Healthy Pet curiously lacks any prominent mention of a Web site. I would want readers to be able to interact with the content online, which would create opportunities to collect data or generate leadsEND

David M. Kalman is President of Terrella Media, Inc.