In the early days of her media company, founder Krista Faced projected the image of a larger organization to win deals. When pitching clients, she would refer to "my director" or "the team" to create layers of authority and credibility, even though it was just her.
Instead of launching a new brand, Faced licensed established UK magazine titles for her Toronto venture. This "imprimatur of an international media company" immediately opened doors with PR agencies and major advertisers, despite her being a solo operator with no initial resources.
Forced to stop street distribution during COVID, Foodism magazine switched to a direct-to-home mail model. This allowed them to target specific postcodes and household incomes, providing advertisers with a more tangible and valuable audience than the previous mass-market handout approach.
Instead of building a costly in-house video team, 22 Media Group is launching a creator program. This strategy combines the publisher's brand authority and sales infrastructure with the content creation skills of established creators, allowing a faster and more efficient entry into short-form video.
The founder of 22 Media Group argues print's value is not in mass reach but in deep engagement. Her sales team is trained to sell print as a premium brand-building tool, emphasizing that a reader choosing to sit with a magazine offers a more valuable, sustained attention span than a 3-second video view.
To jumpstart her newsletter, founder Krista Faced approached a major local hospitality group for a collaborative contest. This partnership gave her direct access to a highly relevant, pre-existing audience, allowing her to acquire her first several thousand subscribers without a marketing budget.
Faced replicated the successful free magazine model she observed in the UK, where publications are handed out at tube stations. This distribution strategy was unique in her new market of Toronto, creating a novel way to reach a mass audience and build a business funded entirely by advertising.
To bootstrap her print magazine without capital, Krista Faced calculated the total cost of the first 50,000-copy run, then spent six months securing advertising partners to cover that exact cost before going to print. This de-risked the launch and funded the second issue.