15 / 116
AUGUST 2016 •
PPB
• 13
This year
PPB
magazine celebrates its
40th anniversary. Its debut in 1976 was
indeed historic, but it was not the
Association’s first publication. History gives
that credit to
The Novelty News
, a monthly
newsletter published by member Henry S.
Bunting that served as the forerunner of
today’s
PPB
.
Producing a newsletter, even a small one,
wasn’t an easy feat in those early days because
the National Association of Advertising
Novelty Manufacturers (PPAI’s founding
name) had no office, no staff and very limited
resources.
In 1921, the organization, which by then
had become the Advertising Specialty
Association, hired its first full-time executive
secretary, opened its first headquarters in
Chicago and began publishing its own
newsletter,
ASA Journal
. The bi-monthly
publication reported on the Association as
well as general business news of interest to
the members.
Over the next 10 years, the newsletter
underwent various name changes such as
The
Specialist
,
Specialty Advertising
and
Specialty
Advertiser
as new editors sought to put their
own mark on the publication. In 1931, when
the Association changed its name to
Advertising Specialty National Association,
the newsletter was updated to
ASNA
Newsletter
.
By the mid-’70s, Specialty Advertising
Association International, as it was then
called, and the industry were growing rapidly
and generating quite a bit of news on a regu-
lar basis. The news could no longer be report-
ed effectively in a four-to-eight-page
newsletter. Enter Sol Shulman, publisher of
Specialty News
, an independent monthly
industry tabloid newspaper, who offered to
sell it. SAAI Board Chair Harry Rosenberg,
CAS, saw it as the perfect communications
vehicle for the Association and recommended
the board buy it. They did.
“At the time we had a little paper that we
were sending out every month,” remembers
Rosenberg, now president of Specialty
Advertising Consultants, Inc. “We were big
enough at that point. We needed a magazine!”
The first issue of the Association’s new
monthly,
Specialty Advertising Business
, rolled
off the presses in April 1976. The plan was to
make the tabloid self-supporting right away
through ad sales but it would be 20 years
before revenues exceeded expenses.
The first editor of the magazine was
SAAI President Bob Rollings, a former edi-
tor at Hearst newspapers in Washington,
D.C. He put his mark on the magazine and
then turned the reins over to Leonard Strub,
who joined SAAI as editor in 1979 when the
Association relocated its headquarters from
Chicago to Irving, Texas.
This writer was the third editor of
PPB
from 1995 to 2001, and then reprised the role
in 2009 upon the departure of Lisa Horn
who was
PPB
’s editor from 2001-2009.
When SAAI Board Chair H. Wayne
Roberts, MAS, took office in 1990 and
announced his theme, “Specialty
Advertising Media for the Twenty-First
Century,” it called for significant changes to
the magazine’s content and design, among
other initiatives. “It included developing a
new look for a contemporary magazine,
moving away from a tabloid size and adding
more features and columns,” says Roberts,
who retired from Pioneer Balloon Company
ROM HUMBLE BEGINNINGS in the basement of a
Chicago office building in 1903, when a handful of advertising specialty
manufacturers met to form an industry association, to today’s global
leader serving more than 14,000 member companies, PPAI has truly
evolved to lead the industry. And right alongside it, the Association’s
magazine has been keeping step and marking the progress.
F