Mozaic Produces Progressive Farmer Magazine

When Progressive Farmer magazine began looking for a digital solution for their publication, they didn't have to look far. The 125-year-old publication has deep roots in Birmingham, Ala., and when they learned about Mozaic, a partnership primarily between Hallmark Data Systems and MetaPress, they knew their publication would benefit from the locally produced digital service.

A simple solution
Mozaic team members Hank Brown, vice president of marketing, Gary Coker, vice president of MetaPress, and Becky Watters, Mozaic product manager, met with Progressive Farmer's publisher to determine their goals for going digital. With Progressive Farmer primarily a print publication, they were unsure what would be involved in offering digital editions. After working with the Mozaic team, they discovered producing digital magazines is much easier than they expected.

"When we began looking at the resources required to build an app, we soon realized we had to find a different solution," Donovan Harris, director of design/ production at Progressive Farmer, said. "Mozaic's browser-based solution allowed us to provide the exact same PDF files we send to our printer to produce our digital editions, therefore not adding strain on our production process." Additional Mozaic features, such as in-depth usage reporting, metadata tagging, access control, and a mobile-optimized reading solution for smartphones and tablets helped win over the publication, which reports agriculture news, market updates and weather updates for farmers.

Seeing the benefits of Mozaic
With more than 1,000 pages of content now available online, the magazine's staff has also seen the business benefits of Mozaic. By using Hallmark to manage their subscriber lists and blast digital edition emails, Progressive Farmer can quickly assess digital edition performance via analytics that report email opens, click-through rates for each edition and detailed usage, even at the subscriber level.

"The usage reports are like getting a readership study with every edition," Allen Vaughan, general manager of Progressive Farmer, said. "We can see what content our readers are viewing, zooming and clicking on as well as gain insight into advertisers receiving the most views and traffic."

Expanding the reach of information
Many Progressive Farmer subscribers have embraced reading the magazine online each month. Mozaic editions can be viewed on computers, smartphones and tablets, so they can read the magazine anywhere, anytime. "We've even heard from farmers enjoying their magazines while in their tractors equipped with GPS cruise controls," Vaughan said.