Shorthorn: working for the next 150 years by Eric Grant, Grant Company LLC
150 years ago, when the American Shorthorn Association (ASA) became America’s first beef breed organization, there were about 40 million people living in the United States. Last February, when ASA broadcast a Shorthorn episode of The American Rancher, 52 million households would have had access to the program that aired on RFD-TV. No doubt the world has changed since the early days of the breed, and no doubt the nature of breed promotions has changed as well – particularly in the last five years as audiences have moved away from traditional media to digital platforms. A couple of years ago, ASA’s CEO Montie Soules sat down with me to discuss the organization’s promotional
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vision for the future. He wanted it to include more social media and broadcast opportunities. Montie had enjoyed great success in promoting cattle on RFD-TV over the years, and I agreed with him that he had been on the right course when it came to promoting Shorthorns. I’d spent the previous decade working for the American Angus Association, where we’d successfully launched the organization into both social media as well as broadcasting, and when I left the organization to form Grant Company, we applied what we’d learned to help others successfully ramp up their own efforts. One of the things that we learned was that breed promotion was not an “either or” proposition; it wasn’t print versus digital or digital versus broadcast. You
needed them all. Having digital, print and broadcast meant we could reach a wider audience on an ongoing basis. And, having a presence in all these media arenas meant you could reach “known” audiences through print while reaching “unknown” audiences through broadcast — and both through digital and social media. So Montie and I shook hands, and the Grant Company team started traveling across the country to capture the Shorthorn story. Since that time, we’ve traveled to nearly 20 states and videotaped and photographed the stories of dozens of Shorthorn breeders. The photos we’ve taken have supported ASA’s print and social media activities. The videos we’ve
