AIN: 50 Years of Market Leadership
While we are gearing up to celebrate 50 years of market leadership in business aviation, we have also been spending a lot of time thinking about the next 50 years. As always, our focus is on how to better serve our two primary customers, the readers and you, our advertising partners. Despite challenging market conditions, we have decided to make significant investments in our business. As you’ll see, we’re focusing these investments on content and distribution, along with providing additional opportunities for you to more effectively reach your ideal customer sets. Also to the benefit of our marketing partners, we are making all of these investments while keeping all of our rates in 2022 unchanged from what you saw in 2021.
Here is a brief summary of where we have made our investments:
AIN Live Events
We are launching a series of one day conferences bringing together AIN editors, leading market experts, and the business aviation community to discuss and debate the most important topics driving our industry today. Our initial series will debut in September of 2021 in Tarrytown N.Y., with a focus on building a sustainable flight department. We have multiple U.S. cities already scheduled this year and next, with our eye on expanding into Europe in 2022. Each of these events will also include high profile sponsorship opportunities. Click here to learn more.
FutureFlight
We launched FutureFlight in January of this year as a subscription-based website and weekly newsletter. FutureFlight fills a void in the market for an information and data product that focuses solely on the newest technologies and business models that will power the future of aviation. Along with providing great original content, we have designed a user experience that will showcase our advertising partners. You can see more at https://www.futureflight.aero
First-Party Data Targeting
You might already be familiar with our Targeted Audience Platform, or TAP as we call it. As a reminder, we invested in a full solution of advanced data collection and segmentation technologies, which are backed by real-time analytics. This allows you to build highly efficient marketing programs that are targeted only to your ideal audience and designed to meet your specific marketing objectives. Click here to learn more.
Redesigned AIN Website
We partnered with a leading web design firm with the goal of enhancing the reader experience, modernizing the site design, and creating unique, and high-impact sponsorship opportunities. We are excited to unveil the fruits of our labor with a tentative launch later in Q4 of 2021. You can see a preview of our new site here.
Redesigned Aviation International News, and Show Dailies
Through our first 50 years, the print edition of AIN has been an integral part of our product suite. AIN is synonymous with business aviation, and we are the clear market leaders. Because of our long-standing commitment to print, our readers continue to show a high demand for it, and our advertising partners see it as an important part of their marketing mix.
Since our launch a half century ago, we have presented our printed content in an oversized format, with an editorial focus on breaking news. Over the years, however, the primary sources to consume breaking aviation news have transitioned to AINonline, and AINalerts. As a result, you have seen the monthly magazine focus more on longer- form features, while still providing a summary of the past month’s most newsworthy events.
After significant analysis we felt it was appropriate to modernize the design and align it more closely with the content we’re providing. So our editorial and design teams have updated the magazine, while also considering a smaller, more conveniently sized format. We have developed an elegant, modern-looking design in a format similar in size to that of Business Jet Traveler’s Buyers’ Guide. This new size, though smaller than today’s AIN, will still represent an oversized magazine format. It will apply for both the monthly edition and the show dailies.
We didn’t take the decision lightly and conducted reader research to ensure their approval. What we found was overwhelming support with nearly 90 percent of respondents indicating they’d spend as much or more time with the magazine in its new format. We also asked how useful the magazine would continue to be if we maintained the trend toward focusing less on breaking news, and more on the longer-form articles previously mentioned. Here again we saw overwhelming support, with over 80 percent of respondents reacting positively
The new design for the AIN monthly will be launched in January 2022, and in all of our show dailies in that year. We will be able to share the new design, advertising specs, and more of the research with you in the coming weeks.