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This summer ADS Direct Media is debuting La Buena Vida, a lifestyle magazine that will ride along with the agency's La Canasta de Valores co-op sampling program.

The 2-year-old co-op is delivered door to door to 2 million Hispanic households in California and Texas. Regional editions of the magazine will be published to accommodate local advertisers.

All editorial will be bilingual, and advertisers will be encouraged to use bilingual creative, says ADS chairman and CEO Dub Doyal. “You have to remember that multigenerational families will be looking at the publication.”

Doyal believes the oversized magazine will be the largest free publication targeting the Hispanic market. Plans call for articles on cooking, sports, entertainment, and lifestyle issues such as marriage and money management. Additionally, partners will be able to offer advertorial features. “We thought [the magazine] would be a good centerpiece to La Canasta,” Doyal says.

The San Antonio, TX-based agency is focusing on California and Texas because those states are home to Hispanic populations with the highest percentages of purchasing power, according to Mayrah Rocafort-Mercado, ADS' vice president, marketing and sales for the Hispanic market. Key distribution areas in California include Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange County, San Francisco, San Jose, Sacramento, Fresno and Stockton. In Texas, Dallas/Fort Worth, Houston, El Paso, San Antonio, Corpus Christi, Austin, Laredo and the Rio Grande Valley will be targeted.

“We'll expand next year, but we needed to offer clients the volume available in those states,” says Rocafort-Mercado.

The sampling program offers a wide range of consumer packaged goods, from health and beauty items like cosmetics to household staples like garbage bags. ADS will increase La Canasta's frequency from twice this year to four times in 2008, with an eventual move to every other month.

La Canasta's 12-inch-by-16-inch polybags are hung on recipients' doors. Because the bags aren't being mailed, direct-to-door will give the sampling program flexibility in size and weight, according to Rocafort-Mercado.

For example, Doyal says that a few years ago a client wanted to send a dog-food pouch sample to prospective customers. If it had been sent by standard mail, the cost would've been 37 cents, but door to door it was just 18 cents. “That's a huge difference,” he adds.

Another benefit of door delivery is that the samples don't compete with other direct mail pieces. Instead of using a whole ZIP code like a carrier route, the co-op is delivered in clusters based on the highest density of Hispanics in a given market. Doyal says ADS' solo marketing programs are more refined — targeting, say, households with children of a particular age.

An eventual goal is to use the co-op — along with surveys and sweepstakes — as a vehicle to build more Hispanic databases, possibly teaming up with outside agencies to append additional information.

At the moment, neither La Canasta de Valores nor La Buena Vida has an online component. Rocafort-Mercado says ADS is considering options such as enabling readers to communicate online with a motivational speaker who will write for the magazine.

ADS — which works primarily with Fortune 500 companies, including AT&T — has several other co-ops in beta stages, Doyal says. The agency has done projects for multilingual populations, including a recent piece with Arabic creative that was sent to the Muslim community in Dearborn, MI.