Over the past three years, the company has developed the best information source in the world on the business of sports, anchored by the SportsBusiness Daily and the weekly publication, The SportsBusiness Journal.
With Pro, we will address an important and, until now, overlooked aspect of the professional sports world - the lives, dreams and concerns that occupy professional athletes off the field. Our mission is to be the information link for these peerless athletes. Pro will be a networking tool for professional athletes and a partisan voice on the issues that affect them the most.
Pro will focus on sports icons as contributors to our culture and our communities. We will celebrate their active and participatory approach to life, applaud their affluence, their celebrity and their insistence on excellence and high performance.
For marketers, this is a bold and exciting new concept. Professional athletes represent the largest concentration of youth, wealth and influence of any group, anywhere. Their spending power is astounding and their ability to influence taste and trends is well documented. Their potential as lifelong customers is unmatched by any other affluent market segment.
Pro will provide marketers with the prime components of value: innovation, quality and the opportunity to affect consumer perceptions. Pro will amplify your messages in this hard to reach, even harder to sell market group.
Pro itself is an innovation in target marketing and a new way to reach thousands of heavy users of luxury goods. By going into their homes, Pro provides marketers with an advantageous selling opportunity among premier athletes. Advertisers in Pro will be in an environment that these wealthy young consumers rely on and trust.
Another Pro innovation is the delivery system established with the players associations. Pro is a designated benefit of membership developed in partnerships with the players unions and Street & Smith's Sports Group. Through this arrangement your advertising messages can reach professional athletes en masse. Pro's direct contact to athletes allows marketers to customize product offerings to a young, affluent, image-conscious audience with an unparalleled income demographic and unmatched visibility.
The editorial and aesthetic quality of Pro will be conspicuous. In addition to the renowned writers and experts that the magazine will feature, the athletes themselves will also be frequent contributors, addressing and advising each other in our pages, creating a sounding board and a community for the men and women who share this unique profession.
The visual presentation will reflect the energy of this youthful audience and the quality deserving of one of the wealthiest audiences found in any magazine. Our magazine will be an excellent blend of groundbreaking design, superior graphics and state-of-the-art photography. Pro will be printed on the highest quality paper stock. Reproduction of your advertising will be second to none.
Pro is a new way to build consumer franchises with an influential market segment. We provide a different way to keep valued customers and a creative way to win new ones. In professional sports, image is as important as reality. Performance is critical to self-esteem and style is a personal statement in playing and living. Pro will be an ideal tool for establishing "preference" for your products and services among this highly sought after market niche.
Men and women who not only want your products but also can afford them will receive Pro. It reaches an audience with "sudden disposable income;" an audience that will not be paralyzed by "virtual consumption." Pro delivers consumers who enhance the value of your brand by "associative imagery." Pro isolates this pool of youth and affluence.
The operating credo for Street & Smith's Pro is basic. To invoke the media magnate Joseph Pulitzer, the staff for Pro magazine will work diligently to: "Put it to them briefly, so they will read it; clearly so they will appreciate it; picturesquely, so they will remember it and above all, accurately so they will be guided by its light."
Pro is the right advertising environment for your products and services. I'm confident that you will see that. And, we welcome the opportunity to prove it. We look forward to welcoming you to one of the most exciting new ventures in publishing . . . Street & Smith's Pro.
