The Story of North Georgia Living
Local isn’t just your neighborhood anymore.
We began North Georgia Living Magazine in 2004 with a vision that, through a single publication, we could provide an advertising vehicle truly created for today’s market.
It all began with this realization: one of our favorite restaurants is in Canton, one is in Cartersville. We love to hunt for antiques in Ellijay and Rome. We love to visit the mountains in Blue Ridge and we love to shop in Roswell. Our dentist is in Woodstock, our doctors in Marietta. Today, it seems everyone travels to find their favorite places and services. Local isn’t just your neighborhood anymore.
Some businesses we patronize have locations all across North Georgia, but they used to have to buy ads in a dozen places to tell people about their business. North Georgia Living has changed that.
We created North Georgia Living to fill that void, first by providing coverage across a large part of North Georgia. Then we added the Georgia Welcome Centers to our distribution, since so many people relocate to, or travel to, or have second homes in North Georgia.
You see, there is nothing else quite like North Georgia Living Magazine. Pretty to look at, filled with information about North Georgia, and presented to you from our hearts.
We hope you enjoy it; and we hope you come back to visit us…again and again!
About Wade and Katherine Cook
Wade and Katherine Cook have been in business in North Georgia for a long time…
Wade is a native of Florida, born in West Palm Beach. Wade first came to Georgia in 1969 to attend Georgia Institute of Technology.
“It was strange when I first came here.” He says. “I came up with my parents to look Tech over and I had never been north of Orlando. It was during the winter and I thought it was so sad that all of the trees on campus had died. You see, in South Florida, there is literally no winter, no trees lose their leaves. But next year, that first fall I spent here changed my mind about North Georgia forever. The fall was so fabulous, with those brilliant colors and wonderful weather, it was so beautiful, who wouldn’t want to stay here forever?”
Wade never left North Georgia, marrying wife Katherine in 1973, and making a career as the owner of several Atlanta businesses, learning about what in small business works, and learning what doesn’t.
“Katherine was always my partner and we were both constantly amazed at the lack of advertising options small businesses seemed to have. They were really quite limited. So when a friend of the family approached us with the idea of starting a magazine like North Georgia Living, we recognized the potential immediately; we saw that it was a great choice for businesses to use to get out their advertising.”
“Our friend, Betty White, showed us a publication she was working on called Lake Martin Living, over in Alabama, and we just loved it.” Katherine says. “It was so obviously a great idea for the businesses that advertised in it. And the idea was really simple. You provide a vehicle that is so attractive and so filled with great information that people can’t help but want it. Then you build on the desire of the readers to regularly read the magazine, that you become a highly successful branding vehicle for the advertiser.”
“But there were a couple of things that Betty explained to us that were ‘unbreakable rules’. First, you publish every single month. We had spent years in all sorts of sales and knew the hard fact about selling. You have to contact your prospective customer every 30 days, or they will just forget about you. A famous adman named Fairfax Cone once said ‘Advertising is what you do when you can’t go see somebody.’ That was our model. We work hard at what we do, because we understand we have the responsibility for doing sales for our customers, that’s really all it is; because they simply can’t go visit their customers each month themselves.”
“The next thing we learned was that you must use public distribution or subscription as the only method of exposing your customer’s advertising. Your other options aren’t very good ones, and although our friend Betty White warned us that distributing tens of thousands of magazines every month might be our hardest job, she also made us understand that there is literally, no other acceptable substitute.”
Last of all, we were committed to making North Georgia Living Magazine the best, most attractive and most informative publication available. People tell us how much they love NGL, that they collect them, sometimes they tell us they have every single issue!
Want to know what they are talking about? Please visit our current issue online and see all that North Georgia Living Magazine has to offer! And please, come back again and again!
