How the other half lives

I met with Susan and Jeff Groeneveld at the Calgary airport yesterday morning just before boarding a flight back to Winnipeg. They were flying to Toronto, so it worked out well. Susan and Jeff, who are married with three kids, run the Canadian office for Woodruff Sweitzer, an ad agency and public relations firm. They represent Arysta, the company that sells Everest herbicide and other crop protection products. Susan and Jeff have some goods ideas on how to reach farmers with their message, and are fans of Grainews. They also shared some tips on how to give and gather information through the Internet. A website isn’t enough, says Susan, because we — Grainews.ca — are just one of thousands of sites offering information to farmers. Instead she says I need to get out there to where the farmers are. Grainews can’t just build a site with a live chat room, for example, and hope visitors will come and hang out. “They won’t,” says Jeff. Susan and Jeff believe the Internet is already working as a communications tool to reach farmers, just not in the way I thought.

This topic came up often on my two-day trip to Saskatoon and Calgary. Cory Bourdeaud’hui, ad sales manager for Grainews, organized the trip to meet with communications and PR people he (and I) deal with on a regular basis. As a writer and editor, I look all over the place for ideas and topics and new things to write about. Many of those ideas come from the ad agencies representing specific companies. As editor, I maintain freedom to pick and choose the topics and decide what goes in and what doesn’t. Everyone I deal with on the other side — the advertisers and sales people — understand and appreciate this. That’s the way it has to work for Grainews to maintain credibly among its readers — and among its advertisers actually.

We flew from Winnipeg to Saskatoon Monday morning to meet with Rod Delahey, who is the PR specialist for Novozymes Canada (formerly Philom Bios), Seed Hawk, UAP and Agrotain. He helps these companies create advertising campaigns and decides which publications — such as Grainews — get the ads. He is also often the first point of contact for editors like me who want to follow up on new product announcements that a company makes. Rod has just merged his company, Heyday Communications, with The Marketing Den, another ad agency in Saskatoon. Cory and I also met with Carmel Lysak, media buyer for the Marketing Den. As a media buyer, she crunches the numbers on how many people get a publication, do these readers represent the target audience for a product, and how much do the ads cost in that publication. She uses that information to decide where to place ads.

At each meeting, Cory explained some our ideas to improve the look and design of Grainews. I had a chance to go over some of the special themes I’m working on for the rest of 2008 and the first half of 2009. I also had my ears open for article ideas.

After lunch with The Marketing Den people, Cory and I flew to Calgary to meet with Derrick Rozdeba for supper. Derrick is the communications manager for Bayer CropScience in Calgary. He has a strong advertising background and he’s very passionate about new media — Internet, websites, blogs, podcasts — and how they can work to enhance traditional print media, like Grainews. 

We went to a recently renovated restaurant called Blink on Calgary’s trendy Stephen Ave. It was a Monday night. Calgarians don’t come downtown on weekday nights, so it was the three of us and the resident down-and-outs on the street. For the last hour of our meal, we were the only table in the restaurant. I ordered an old-cheddar soufflé, at Derrick’s recommendation, for an appetizer. My mum used to make soufflés when I was a kid, and I don’t remember liking them that much. This is the first time in 25 years I’ve had a soufflé, and it was so light and sharp and delicious. I will order that again the next time I’m at Blink. For an entrée, I had yellowfin tuna. (To make amends to Alberta’s beef producers, I had a steak the next night.) Chef Andrew Richardson, originally from Newcastle, England, did a great job just searing the outside and keeping the inside totally raw. His partner Leslie Echino, the "restaurant director" as it says on her business card, helped us pick a wine. She picked a bottle worth $150. Derrick thought that was too much, which was nice of him since Grainews was paying the bill. Leslie then recommended another “cheaper” bottle that was $105. Cory then says, “We’re from Winnipeg. Do you have anything for $25.” We settled for the second cheapest bottle on the list. It was from Italy and I don’t recall the grape or the winery.

The next day we had a breakfast meeting with Wayne Karlowsky, ad agent for Nufarm. Then we went to AdFarm to meet the public relations team representing Bayer CropScience, one of AdFarm’s major clients. After that we crossed the AdFarm floor — through the virtual glass wall — to visit the folks working on the Dow AgroSciences account. Because the two sides cannot share any details on specific campaigns, AdFarm insists that the two groups stay separate within the same building. Ben Graham, the Dow lead, took us across the street for a beer and nachos. Ben's family farms at Vulcan and he takes a few weeks off per year to help out. They had a lot of rain the past week, so Ben was saying they might hire a neighbour to help seed the couple thousand acres they've still got to put in. 

Finally, we had supper than night with Stan Audette, communications manager with Dow AgroSciences. Stan is my first point of contact when I’m looking for information about Dow pesticides or Nexera canola. Stan grew up in Niverville, Man., on a 1,000-acre farm with laying hens. His dad, who was originally from Melfort, Sask., was a pharmacy prof at the University of Manitoba. Because of his father’s experience, Stan says he always buys brand name drugs. “Unless we support the brand name companies, these companies will have no money to develop new drugs,” Stan said. He could have used that point in the conversation to remind us that it’s the same for farm chemicals, but he didn’t. He didn’t have to. 

Stan joined Elanco in 1981 right out of university and he has been with Dow ever since. He started in research, then did 12 years of sales, and has been communications manager for eight years. The job is not always glamourous, but Stan is always thinking about farmers. “Today I ordered 800 Simplicity hats, and worked to get the price lowered by $2 a hat,” he told us. “I negotiated knowing that the savings will eventually get back to farmers in some small way.” That's Stan.

This gives you some idea of the people I come in contact with on the advertising and PR side of the publishing business. Many of them are farmers or grew up on farms, and all of them are passionate about agriculture.