History of This Month Local Area Magazines

This Month Local Area Magazines (formerly Sanoviv Publications) was established in October 1998, and is a small family-owned business dedicated to excellent customer service and better value advertising. Husband and wife team Sandy and Peter Sanderson work together to sell advertisements and do photography, artwork and editorials for the magazine. This ensures a higher quality standard is achieved. Casual graphic artists also assist from time to time.

Sandy has a Bachelor of Arts Degree from the University of NSW, with a major in languages (German and French) and humanities (1979). She subsequently undertook post-graduate teaching studies at Simon Fraser University Vancouver, moving later to marketing, communication and business studies at Griffith University Gold Coast and Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane. With her special love for writing, philosophy and personal development topics there is always good inspiration for interesting articles in the magazine!

Peter Sanderson is qualified in Applied Science (water testing and food technology), however his passion for photography and food took over after moving to the Gold Coast in the 80's, when he developed a specialisation in sales and digital food photography, as well as product photography for advertisements and brochures.

Sandy and Peter pioneered this unique marketing product because there was a need for small businesses to talk to their local customer base regularly to build relationships of trust and awareness in a cost-effective manner. Newspapers were too broad-based and expensive, which meant that many small businesses were paying for distribution to areas highly unlikely to achieve a response for them due to distance. Leaflets could be locally targeted, but were too prolific in letterboxes and very quickly discarded as junk mail. So Sandy and Peter began with a modest black and white newsletter for Main Beach and Broadbeach (and February 2000 for Burleigh). Early in 2002 they launched three new areas - Robina, Benowa-Bundall and North Gold Coast and also changed the format of the magazine to full colour gloss paper.

Over the years the magazine's coverage has grown and its style and content has evolved to an ever higher standard, until in 2006, in response to changing demographics, the decision was made to amalgamate the smaller area magazines into three. By 2007 the quality standard had been raised again, as This Month then reduced from monthly to bi-monthly (6 issues per year) in order to provide the highest quality for the highest volume at the lowest price. This was a move that made it more sustainable for small business - This Month's major supporters and highest priority. The logo was revamped, the front cover ad removed, and a thicker cover of 170gsm was added to the outside. More editorial content and community columnists were also added.

Now in 2008, another improvement has been introduced from the April-May issue. The distribution has been expanded from 50,000 to 60,000 magazines delivered free to the top one third demographics, representing the higher real estate values of the Gold Coast. This ensures that lifestyle and service businesses can more accurately target their prospective customer base - and at a very reasonable price! Usually only a handful of reponses is required to recoup costs and make a profit, which makes this form of advertising very low risk.

The support of regular long-term advertisers by their local communities has ensured a win-win situation for all. Advertisers can afford regular and consistent advertising to establish awareness and relationship with their local market. And locals have now come to look at This Month magazines' advertisers as 'referred', preferred and trustworthy.