LIVE! magazine recognized statewide at Texas Community Newspaper Association awards

June 14, 2007
By Joe Hyde
Special to LIVE!

LIVE! Magazine is now an award-winning publication in West Texas. The Texas Community Newspaper Association (TCNA) announced the winners this morning. LIVE! entered the 2006 awards competition when the publication was only six months old. LIVE! placed in three categories: Best Original Ad Series, Best Feature Story, and Best Original Black and White Ad.

LIVE! won second place statewide for The Best Original Ad Series with the original campaign, “Bob Knows Del Rio.” This was a series of three ads produced by Joe Hyde, publisher of LIVE! and Steve Mott, marketing director at Brown Automotive Center in Del Rio. The advertising campaign addressed the challenges faced by automotive dealers in marketing over the Internet. Anonymity encouraged Internet automobile shoppers to seek the best deal in price alone. What was missing was the chance to build a relationship.

The “Bob Knows Del Rio” ad series created a relationship with readers on a mass scale, encouraging them to communicate with Brown Automotive Center’s Internet sales manager. The relationship-building campaign included three monthly print ads in a series, each encouraging readers to ask Bob a question on his Internet Web site, bobknows.com. The first ad encouraged readers to ask questions about the local area. “Bob knows Del Rio,” the ad said. “Ask Bob.” The second ad informed readers that Bob knew football, and they can log on to bobknows.com to ask about football. At the end of the series, Bob introduced his “Think Tank” that included all of the sales professionals at Brown Automotive Center.

“The biggest benefit this ad campaign had was to get potential clients to contact us online, and we received a big response” Mott said. “It was a collaboration of three people in Del Rio who had some sales and marketing experience [Steve Mott, Bob Corbell, and Joe Hyde]. We generated more contacts out of that ad that anything else we did that year [2006]. It was especially good for the Internet side at Brown Automotive Center,” Mott said.

The “Bob Knows” campaign was created with an Olympus SP-350 camera, Adobe Photoshop, and the typography was completed in Adobe InDesign. The Web site bobknows.com was built upon the Drupal content management system using the PHP/MYSQL framework.

The Best Feature Story, second place, was for the article I wrote on U.S. Air Force Staff Sergeant Israel del Toro , a former tactical air controller who was almost killed in Afghanistan in December 2005. Del Toro was treated in San Antonio and made a trip to Laughlin Air Force Base to thank Chief Master Sergeant Ruben Gonzalez for volunteering to guide his wife and family through the financial and bureaucratic maze Air Force families face when the service member in the family is injured. It was a difficult story to write because having served a 20-year career in the Air Force as a pilot working with TACPs, there was a personal and emotional connection with del Toro and what happened to him. LIVE! feature writer Bill Sontag, who is the heart and soul of our editorial effort here, put me through about three revisions on the del Toro story before it went to press.

LIVE! graphic artist Kristen Vasicek (now married to George Wardlaw) helped us with the September and October 2006 issues. At that time, The Emporium wanted a new ad graphic. Kristen told me she had a great idea and went to The Emporium and photographed Jim Sanders passing an ice cream cone across the counter of their soda fountain. Kristin “aged” the photograph using Adobe Photoshop, and added the Emporium’s sign. The ad has been running in our print publication, alternating months from time-to-time, since September 2006. Jim and Betty Sanders operate the original renovated business in historic Downtown Del Rio at 800 S. Main. The Emporium is the only soda fountain in Del Rio, and the ad captures that with nostalgia and a hint of modern times by using Jim as the subject. In addition to Photoshop, Kristen used Adobe Illustrator for typography and layout of this ad. The ad placed third statewide for “Best Black and White Print Ad.”

LIVE! Magazine celebrates its first year of business with the July issue. Now LIVE! is an award-winning magazine, the only award-winning publication in our market. What sets LIVE! apart from other media is the enormous amount of purpose and meaning we place into each story we post on the Web and everything we place in the monthly print publication.

LIVE! is run in two editions. Southwest Texas LIVE! covers the southwest Texas region, centered upon Del Rio, Eagle Pass, Brackettville, Rocksprings, Sonora, and Sanderson, Texas. San Angelo LIVE! covers the Concho Valley.