• by Larry Dobrow , January 9, 2004

Cowboys & Indians has long billed itself as "the Premier Magazine of the West." But if Publisher Greg Brown has his way, the 11-year-old title will be informally adopting a new motto in 2004: go East, young magazine.

This, of course, is not to say that the mag will start including Upper East Side spreads alongside its coverage of posh ranches and Western fashion. It's just that Brown realizes that awareness of C&I in the Eastern part of the United States lags far behind its top-of-the-coffee-table-pile status in the West. His goal for the year, then, is to stay true to the mag's original editorial mission while at the same time seeking out new readers via a range of marketing vehicles.

"Awareness is really our only major challenge," Brown says. "If you're where we are in circulation [120,000 paid], it's sometimes difficult to get in with the right media buyers."

Brown has a lot going for him in his quest. Editorially, C&I owns a unique niche in the marketplace - think an amalgam of Architectural Digest, American Cowboy, and Town & Country. Also, it seems to have become somewhat of a media darling, with recent plugs in Forbes and Folio. And then there are C&I's readers, who boast a household income of $150,000 per year and an average net worth of more than $1.1 million.

"They're passionate about the West," he says. "They're avid travelers. They like to do things outdoors. And they buy out a lot of what they see in the magazine."

Brown is referring to the wares hawked by Western clothing and accessory companies that line the pages of every issue, as well as the Western-themed art and furniture whose presence is equally ubiquitous. Still, while such goods and companies complement the magazine's editorial focus, they're probably not enough to fuel the growth Brown hopes to attain. It's almost unimaginable, for example, that the 180-page January 2004 issue of C&I doesn't contain a single ad for an automobile of any kind. Cowboys don't tend to use mass transportation, do they?

Brown acknowledges that car companies - who have run in C&I in the past - are his top target for 2004, with Range Rover and Chevrolet heading the list. "We really should have the high-end motor companies who are looking for the upscale audience we provide," he shrugs. "We should have more finance institutions." He emphasizes, however, that he's not about to cut, say, Volvo a discount simply for the prestige of having its new SUV in the magazine.

"I don't intend for this to come out negative, but we can't continue to grow the magazine if we give low rates to car companies," he explains. "If it's not a rate we can make money with, we're not going to do it."

This, in all probability, is one of the major reasons why Brown has chosen to promote C&I through other venues. The mag's 2004 budget can accommodate more than one million pieces of direct mail ("we're getting nearly a ten percent response rate"), and distribution agreements have already been cemented with high-end hotels in Santa Fe, Aspen, and Houston. Given the mag's entertainment coverage - the January issue boasts a Johnny Cash feature and a ranking of the 100 greatest country songs that's smarter than anything seen recently in Rolling Stone - C&I's co-sponsorship with BMI and other record labels of the "Country in the Rockies" event seems a good fit.

Television could be C&I's next venue, as the mag is in discussion with a handful of potential partners to develop Cowboys & Indians Behind the Lens, which Brown describes as a "30-minute magazine show."

So will C&I's awareness push work? Given the twin American fascinations with the cowboy lifestyle and Western design, there's no reason it shouldn't. In addition, a host of high-profile covers planned for the next few months (The Lord of the Rings' Viggo Mortensen, multimedia teen and native Texan Hilary Duff) should drive single-copy sales. For Brown, a sure sign of the mag's progress came when speaking with a friend who works in New York for News Corp.

"He told me he saw Cowboys & Indians [on the newsstand] in his building," Brown says. "So it's taking a while, but we're getting there."