Rodale Inc., a tranquil company where employees gather for 5 o’clock on-site yoga classes and even the office coffee beans are sustainably sourced, MaryAnn Bekkedahl has been something of a noisemaker. At an international sales meeting she ran while heading up Men’s Health’s international business, for example, Bekkedahl organized a soccer tournament that ended with several Americans on the injury list, to the horror of longtime company steward Ardie Rodale. In other years, Bekkedahl’s meetings ended with boozy pool parties and, once, a dance contest that got so rowdy that the resort got complaints from other guests. “Ultimately, we just bought people off,” Bekkedahl says of the bills she footed to cool various tempers.

But that was then. Today, Bekkedahl’s the parent of two children (ages 2 and 5), which means the wee hours are for sleeping, even when she’s on the road. Not that Bekkedahl, 40, has regrets. More often than not, the risk-taking has paid off -- for both sales exec and employer. Since Rodale put this executive vp, group publisher in charge of integrating companywide print and online sales two years ago, the publisher of health and wellness titles including Prevention, Women’s Health and Runner’s World has outpaced the entire magazine industry in page growth. The results Bekkedahl has achieved have made her AdweekMedia’s Publishing Executive of the Year.

Privately held Rodale does not disclose dollar figures, but it did reveal that from 2006 to 2007, ad pages at its magazines grew 14.9 percent—an astonishing gain at a time when industrywide pages declined 0.6 percent, per Publishers Information Bureau. Though Rodale’s ad pages dipped 5.2 percent the following year, the industry’s losses were more than double that, tumbling 11.7 percent.

While most publishing companies say they’re moving to address clients’ demands for surround-sound programs, print buyers say Rodale is one of the few that actually does it well.

“When you start to look at the big houses, Time Inc. is not there, Meredith is not there,” says Carolyn Dubi, senior vp, director of print, Initiative. “If you try to do cross-platform negotiations, they’ll bring the six or eight people in a room, and it gets complicated. With an ESPN or Rodale, they bring in one person. It’s what clients expect, and it’s how the agencies are evolving.”

While most other publishing houses were taking baby steps towards cross-platform sales, Rodale made the transformation virtually overnight. In one fell swoop, the publisher merged its print and online sales functions across all of its titles. Online salespeople were assigned to individual publishers, while print salesfolk were trained to sell the Web. Similar changes took place on the editorial side, where once-centralized online staffers were assigned to individual magazine editors.



With no template to work with, Bekkedahl first had to train her print sales force to sell online, which also meant changing the compensation structure. The problem was, once members of the sales team met their print quotas for the year, they were hardly motivated to sell online, especially given the small incentives. Bekkedahl wasn’t surprised. “Perks and bonuses haven’t done a great job motivating people,” she says. “People are really motivated to meet their quota.” Her solution was to weight compensation in favor of the Web (“to force the issue”) and then eliminate the print/online distinction altogether. “The company wanted to drive as much revenue as possible from the clients who need us,” says Bekkedahl. “We don’t care if it’s print or online.”

The numbers proved her correct: Online revenue grew 70.9 percent in 2007 and 18.3 percent in 2008. Cross-platform programs involving at least one title grew to 89 in 2008 from 46 the year before, and represented 11 percent of total ad revenue in 2008, according to Bekkedahl.

Apart from lauding Rodale for delivering on all the cross-platform talk, buyers praise Bekkedahl for listening to them and tailoring packages to clients’ needs.

“She thinks with an agency hat on,” says Brenda White, senior vp, publishing activation director, Starcom USA, who recalls meeting with Bekkedahl when she was just starting the integration process. “She actually came in and said, ‘What do you think about me breaking down silos?’ I was jumping up and down.”

Kristi Lind, group account director at OMD for Nissan and Infiniti, says Rodale impressed her by testing a campaign while it was underway, allowing for mid-course correcting—a service other publishers, in her experience, either don’t offer or charge extra for. Bekkedahl’s detail-driven concern in this area helped Rodale win greater share with Nissan in 2008, Lind says.

Rodale also has a big fan in Jeff Fischer, senior vp, managing director of Universal McCann’s Johnson & Johnson print business. For a previous client of his, Rodale was willing to subcontract with an outside company to find a sporting event that suited the client’s needs. “Often, people have things they want to sell and they want to fit a square peg in a round hole,” Fischer says. “She wants to do something that’ll work for us.”

The success stories notwithstanding,  Bekkedahl wasn’t an obvious choice for group publisher. The promotion would take her from running a single brand (Men’s Health) to holding a senior management position with big human resources (not to mention strategy-setting) responsibilities. One thing helping her cause was a strong track record in sales. As publisher of Men’s Health, she drove double-digit ad page gains in part by pounding home its clean circulation story (the title has made Capell’s top 10 circulation performers list for 12 years). John Griffin, Bekkedahl’s former Rodale boss and now president of National Geographic Publishing, recalls how rivals dismissed Men’s Health as “sex and abs, not a good environment for your luxury products.” But Bekkedahl broke new watch business, paving the way for other luxury categories to follow.



Still, Bekkedahl’s ascendancy would take the boosterism of Rodale CEO and president Steve Murphy, who saw a frank-talking “star” in Bekkedahl when he picked her for the group publisher job in 2005. Murphy recalls seeing Bekkedahl’s pluck years ago, in Milan, just before the two were scheduled to meet with executives from Giorgio Armani. Murphy had not even met Bekkedahl yet when she called him on his phone. “She said, ‘What are you planning on wearing?’” before hanging up abruptly, recalls Murphy. Other bosses might’ve been miffed at her familiarity, but Murphy was smitten. “She’s charmingly aggressive,” he says. “She’s an important element in a culture of congeniality.”

Having the right assets, of course, is the other side of Rodale’s success. Murphy, who moved to the corner office in 2002 after serving as president and COO, has extended Rodale’s well-known health and fitness magazines into other formats, including books, events, Web and video. Today, magazines make up 48.7 percent of total company revenue, from 50.5 percent five years ago.

“I’m a big believer in the brands coming up with what the constituency wants,” Murphy says. “When that happens, something like [Men’s Health spinoff] Eat This, Not That! bubbles up, and we take it to market—and we are 3.5 million units and counting.”

Despite the economic headwinds, Murphy is pushing his editors and publishers to develop a new batch of extensions this year. At a recent off-site confab, he green-lit a new version of ETNT!, MH editor David Zinczenko’s smash hit of 2008. Men’s Health and Women’s Health, which Zinckenko also oversees, are each slated to come out with a Big Book of Exercises. Women’s Health also has two bookazines (a higher-priced title with a longer shelf life) slated for debut.

Prevention plans to come out with a number of extensions around its Dtour diabetes management program. Runner’s World has doubled to six the number of books that are in the works. And Murphy has ordered up more mini-launches along the lines of Prevention’s Cook!, a new in-book section that’s designed to live on multiple platforms. Several of the brands also are planning new iPhone applications. Murphy says that while Rodale has always shown enthusiasm for new product development, “This year, there’s an imperative. The economy has focused our mind.”

Not that Rodale’s been recession-proof. In November, it cut 111 people—10 percent of its companywide staff—and disbanded its corporate sales and marketing arm. In February, Rodale let go another 20 people, this time from the sales side, including Prevention publisher Bob Ziltz, who was replaced by Women’s Health publisher Mary Murcko. The latter title’s publisher duties went to Men’s Health publisher Jack Essig, who is now senior vp, publisher of both. Earlier this month, Rodale folded 526,276-circulation BestLife, the affluent men’s lifestyle title it spun off from Men’s Health four years ago.



Big multiple-title deals haven’t evaporated entirely; so far this year, Rodale has inked 10 big-scale integrated deals, involving advertisers like Nissan, Kellogg and MetLife. But Bekkedahl worries that without having people dedicated to corporate accounts, the company is less likely to find out about funds available for cross-title deals. “The biggest fear is that without a corporate sales team, are we going to find those opportunities?” she asks herself.

People are spending less on books and magazines while marketers hold back budgets—factors hurting not just Rodale, of course, but all magazines. (For the first quarter of ’09, ad pages industrywide fell 22.8 percent, per the Mediaweek Monitor.) But because of a longstanding, self-imposed ban on running tobacco and liquor ads, Rodale can’t go after those categories to make up for softness elsewhere.

Yet Bekkedahl believes that Rodale is well positioned to weather another tough year. Company research found that consumers are paying more attention to looking after themselves, potentially strengthening the market for Rodale’s health and fitness books and magazines. And Rodale has set itself up to sell across its print, Web and other platforms. At a time when many print publishers still lack online selling experience, Bekkedahl says, “We’re still kind of unique.” Indeed, they are—even though the sales meetings don’t end with soccer matches anymore.     

Lucia Moses is a senior editor at Mediaweek.




Sister Act, Media Style

Sibling rivalry is often responsible for all sorts of problems. But in the case of MaryAnn Bekkedahl and her sisters, it’s responsible for a good part of Rodale’s success.

Initially, Bekkedahl figured she’d stay in the math and statistics field, following her college major. As time went on, though, she found herself more interested in the media career track that her older sisters Carolyn and Barbara were taking. Through an introduction by Carolyn, MaryAnn made the jump, landing a job selling ads at Rodale’s venerable Prevention. “She saw the two of us launching really exciting careers,” Carolyn recalls. “She was really eager to get in.”

After a brief stint at Meredith Corp.’s Ladies’ Home Journal, MaryAnn returned to Rodale, where she rose through the ranks to publisher of Men’s Health. Later, she became senior vp, global brand director, overseeing the title’s international expansion. In 2005, she was promoted to group publisher.

While Barbara followed a cable TV career path, taking the job of vp, sales at Bravo in 2008, MaryAnn followed Carolyn on the print publishing track. (A fourth sister, Alison, is a teacher.)
Over the years, MaryAnn and Carolyn’s parallel careers drew them close but also stoked rivalries. The two competed head-to-head when MaryAnn was running Men’s Health and Carolyn was group publisher at American Media, over titles like Men’s Fitness and Shape. “I remember hanging up the phone and thinking, ‘Damn, she got 10 pages and I got five!’” Carolyn says. The two also dueled for AdweekMedia Hot List bragging rights (Men’s Health came in ahead of Shape in 2004 at Nos. 4 and 5, respectively, only to be leapfrogged by Shape the next year). Now, Carolyn is president and chief revenue officer of Mochila, an online market for syndicated content, which counts Rodale as a client.

With a father who was a career naval officer, the Bekkedahl sisters grew up in a household where sports and fitness were a regular part of family life. MaryAnn was the least active of the sisters -- ironic, given that she publishes some of the leading health and fitness brands, and a running joke at the company. But as the youngest daughter, she’s been the proverbial glue, remembering birthdays and organizing get-togethers. It’s a trait that has also served her well in her career. “I’m the youngest of the four, and the youngest is always the one who wants to make everyone happy,” MaryAnn says. “That’s definitely the case with us. And trying to keep everybody happy is something salespeople definitely try to do.”

Carolyn says that while her sister may not be a fitness nut, it’s her passion for the products she works for that have fueled her accomplishments.

“She gets deeply involved in the brands and understands their DNA and markets,” Carolyn says. “That’s the key to MaryAnn’s success.”  —L.M.