PM Advertising’s Siegel thinks outside the box

Creativity marks equine-driven agency’s work

By Sid Fernando

Jon Siegel is co-owner and managing partner of the equine-driven ad agency PM Advertising, one of the leaders in the game. PM’s stallion ads tend to be visually appealing, no matter the level of stud fee, but they also tend to be mind-engaging, and this separates Siegel’s firm from many others.

Siegel doesn’t just slap a photo on the page with some colorful fonts that highlight pedigree, stud fee, and contact information, and then call it a day, nor does he riddle the viewer to the point of frustration with his layouts. Instead, he’s creative and clear with form and function, and his messaging has impact, whether it’s subliminal or direct.

Siegel called me the other day, somewhat frustrated with an idea he was trying to conceptualize. He asked, “Have you seen a horse’s pedigree improve as much as this one’s since going to stud? I’m trying something here, but I don’t think I’m getting my point across to people, and maybe it’s just me and I don’t have anything.”

The horse in question was the Juddmonte-bred Tapit son Tacitus, whose first yearlings will sell this week at Fasig-Tipton. Tacitus entered stud at Taylor Made in 2022 and stood this year for $10,000—pretty good value for a Grade 2 winner who earned $3,767,350 and placed in such Grade 1 races as the Kentucky Derby, Belmont Stakes, Travers, and the Jockey Club Gold Cup. That he stands for only $10,000 is for the same reason: because he garnered a reputation for just missing repeatedly at the highest level.

However, Siegel—who is knowledgeable about pedigrees—was impressed by the growth in stature of Tacitus’s blue-blooded family, and he wanted to use that fact in an ad. Since going to stud, Tacitus’s full siblings Scylla and Batten Down have become graded winners, and his champion and Grade 1-winning dam’s full sister is now the dam of the Curlin champion and Grade 1 winner Idiomatic.

I told Siegel a similar explosion had occurred with Into Mischief’s pedigree after he went to stud, inexpensively like Tacitus. “I wrote about that in TDN,” I said. That’s all Siegel needed. He tracked down the piece.

I’d forgotten about this conversation until I saw the Tacitus PM ad (see below) in TDN the other day.

It gets Siegel’s message across loud and clear, and the backstory behind it illustrates Siegel’s out-of-the box thought process.