At Venture Publishing, we take pride in producing the best business magazines in Alberta. Full of thoughtful, informative, and intelligent content, Alberta Venture and Alberta Oil are the must-read publications for executives, business owners and energy sector leaders across the province. And we know better than anyone the challenges facing business owners in the current economic climate.

We know that sustained advertising and marketing efforts are important to your continued business success. Research shows that recessions can actually be an opportunity for those companies that maintain branding. With your competitors slashing their budgets, this is an opportunity for you to gain market position, to gain new customers and to build loyalty with your existing client base.

Venture Publishing is helping you fight the recession by reducing our advertising rates on our two flagship publications. How can we do this? By streamlining our circulation on Alberta Venture and Alberta Oil, we are able to pass those savings – printing, postage, freight – along to our clients. We are focusing our efforts on maintaining those readers who are most important to your business success, the high-level decision-makers across Alberta and around the world whom you can only reach through Alberta Venture and Alberta Oil.

For advertisers, this translates into a significant savings off our previously published rates, effective the August 2009 issues. We deliver the same high-caliber audience and engagement at a reduced cost. And that is a recession-fighting strategy that you can take to the bank.

For information on our rates and dates, please visit:

• Alberta Oil rate card
• Alberta Venture rate card

We wish you continued good business.
Ruth Kelly
Publisher and Editor-in-Chief
Venture Publishing Inc.

Venture Publishing is suspending the print publication of Unlimited magazine and moving operations online only, effective with its May/June 2009 issue.

Says president and publisher Ruth Kelly, “We remain confident in the vision for Unlimited magazine and proud of its execution. Unfortunately with the current economic reality, Unlimited has not had time to find its feet with print advertisers. In contrast the website continues to grow in visitorship and revenue generation. Consequently, we are going to focus on growing and enhancing Unlimited at unlimitedmagazine.com at this time, and will plan to re-launch the print version within 12 to 24 months, when the market has stabilized. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s official. We are now living in interesting times. Which isn’t to say that it hasn’t been interesting to be in business in Alberta over the last decade – interesting barely scrapes the surface of the shape and size and speed of running a business in this province during the past 10 years. However, at Venture we also wear the other hat of upon the business and economic activities of Alberta and the global turbulence we are all experiencing makes for a very dynamic period in which to be a journalist. I have not attended a single event in the past three weeks where someone has not asked me how I think Alberta will weather the storm and what I am forecasting for the next year.

So let me give you the disclaimer I give everyone who poses those questions: my deck of tarot cards has gone missing, my crystal ball is cracked and I’ve never seen anything in tea leaves except for, well, tea leaves. That said, here’s my professional opinion. We are at the beginning of an economic slowdown but I am daily grateful that I am in Alberta. We will certainly feel the impact but to nowhere near the extent that it will be felt in the United States or in central Canada. If it is wise, the provincial government will use the funds it has set aside to escalate large public infrastructure projects and that will pick up some of the slack from any deferred private projects. We should feel fortunate that billions of dollars have been tucked away for just this purpose.

The greater issue is how individual businesses will face this upheaval. The economist Joseph Schumpeter coined the phrase “creative destruction” to explain exactly this type of situation. It was his contention that violent market upheaval actually primed the engine of capitalism by sweeping away decaying old companies and ideas to make room for innovative new ones. In his perspective, the true entrepreneur should relish the opportunity to solve the problems inherent in such change – and make money in doing so. Ergo, creative destruction gives rise to innovation, creativity and growth.

It’s a heartening concept. I was also intrigued to see a recent poll of Canadian businesses that suggested 52% of the respondents saw this as a time to get aggressive with their marketing and outshine their competitors. Certainly that’s going to be our stance at Venture. If we can help you with your plans to build out your business, we’d love to talk to you. Or if you just want me to read your palm, I could give that a shot too.

I’m in awe of those individuals who maintain a daily or even weekly blog. With the volume and speed of business I am submerged in, finding the time to update this one every two months has proven too great a task for me (not that you would want to read my ramblings more frequently – the minutia of my work-life would quickly be revealed as stunningly boring).

However, I’m confident that visitors to the advertisewithventure.com site will forgive me for my sporadic correspondence when I explain that my time has been largely consumed with the acquisition and relaunch of another magazine – Alberta Oil. We at Venture Publishing are completely thrilled with this new addition to our stable of magazines. Alberta Oil was launched in 2005 by Skinnyfish Media in Calgary and quickly gained a reputation as a thought leader on the issues of the energy industry. Under the able editorial leadership of Gord Jaremko, one of Canada’s most respected energy journalists, Alberta Oil will build on this platform to become the definitive source of information on Canada’s energy industry for Canadians and beyond.

The first issue of Alberta Oil under Venture’s ownership will be released at the end of September. In addition to the new editor at the helm, we’ve made several changes – all for the better, we believe. The magazine has been redesigned by award-winning art director Theresa Kwan; an even more targeted circulation strategy will be unrolled with this relaunched issue; and the frequency of the magazine has been increased to six times per year, though in 2009, we are publishing a seventh, special interest issue on The Greening of the Energy Industry.

Our account executives, Josh, Ariel and CJ, would be happy to tell you about all the exciting initiatives we are instituting for Alberta Oil, including our digital strategy and targeted sponsorship opportunities. You can find their contact information on this website, in the Alberta Oil section under Magazine Advertising.

The other activity that has kept us busy at Venture has been the redevelopment and relaunch of the Alberta Venture website. Tagged as the place ‘Where Alberta’s Business Leaders Meet’, albertaventure.com now offers a boggling array of tools and opportunities for your online marketing needs. I encourage you to visit albertaventure.com after September 2, 2008 to explore its many new features – and enter to win a $2,000 Blackberry Bold package or one of the Alberta Venture swag bags.

It’s almost September – the period that truly is the busiest of the year. Perhaps I’ll have a chance to see you at Alberta Venture’s V100 Business Leadership Forum or our booth at the Oilsands Show or at the Women on Board Corporate Governance Symposium. Or perhaps you’ll see me running down the street of Edmonton or Calgary to get to my next meeting. Either way, please stop me to say hello – slowing down to greet colleagues is a great way to break my addiction to speed.

I hope the autumn season brings you a bountiful harvest of business.

Or perhaps for the first time. You see, we’ve had a version of this site up since 2003. But I’ll be the first to acknowledge that it was very rudimentary. That’s not surprising, considering it was built in-house in html by one of our magazine designers.

Fast forward five years. In September of 2007, Anita McGillis, VP sales for Venture, and I went off to New York for the annual magazine conference called Folio. One of the sessions I attended was on new delivery methods for media kits. A presenter from People en Espanol talked about the previous week’s launch of their revolutionary concept – a website devoted to all things advertising for their magazine. After a brief moment of gloating that we had developed this idea long in advance of the big American magazine machine, I realized that our site no longer truly represented the full breadth of Venture Publishing’s advertising and sponsorship opportunities. In the past five years, we have developed our contract publishing division, which includes four magazines that accept advertising, rolled out a full range of online advertising and sponsored content options, created new programs like Alberta’s Best Workplaces and the Venture100 Business Leadership Forum, established professional development activities such as Women on Board and Unlisted Symposium, and of course, launched our newest magazine, Unlimited.

So we’ve been a tad busy, which I’ll offer as the feeble excuse for the length of time it took for us to refresh and relaunch this site. But now that it’s up and going, you have my commitment that it will remain relevant, comprehensive and filled with intriguing and vital information. Advertisewithventure.com is intended to be the one-stop centre of information for our clients. Want the rate card for Food for Thought? It’s here. Looking for detailed Alberta Venture readership information? Also here. Editorial schedules, ad formats, online options, sponsorship packages? Here, here, here, here. We don’t want to encourage you to be working until midnight but on the off chance that in the wee hours of the night you are seized with the recognition that the one thing your perfect media mix is missing is targeted, effective, quality-driven print ads, you need only come to this site to have all questions answered.

And of course, if you want your account executive to send you the insertion order for that print ad first thing in the morning, you can fire off an email to them directly from this site as well. Then for goodness sakes – get to bed! Do you want big bags under your eyes?

I hope you’ll find this site useful. If there’s some way we can improve it to meet your needs more effectively, please let us know. And in the meantime, make sure you enter the contest for your chance to win a trip for two to San Francisco. The entry form can be accessed by clicking on the banner on the home page or HERE and you must answer five simple questions to qualify. Incidentally, if you get the first question wrong, not only will you not win, you may be struck off my Christmas card list.

Cheers