It’s fun to be your own client.
That’s the sentiment expressed by Vancouver public relations veteran Shannon Heth. After years of growth, Heth recently made the difficult decision to rebrand her eponymous lifestyle PR company, Heth PR, to a new, more inclusive name: Milk Creative Communications. In doing so, the company president allowed herself to engage in a branding exercise that not only got the word out about the shift, but engaged a city hungry for clever, cosmopolitan ideas.
Playing off the name, she and her team – Colin Rose, Holly Lambert, Ryan Molag, Jenn Munroe, Anna McDonald, Nicola Humphrey and Hannah Prince – launched the Crunchtime Cereal Bar, a colourful, two-day pop-up breakfast bar featuring familiar and exotic cereals from around the world. With visitors paying $5 a bowl, the September initiative raised just under $1,800 for charity, allowed Milk to flex its creative muscle, and left food-obsessed Vancouverites buzzing.
Milk followed that success up with another food-themed event: February’s smash-hit Edible Museum. This time, to promote Milk’s stable of Canadian wines, Heth and co. retained museum experts, local event producers and professional food designers to create a one-day museum of Canadian cuisine, featuring samples of wine alongside patriotic infographics, a “deconstructed” poutine display, a classic Quebecois sugar shack, a McIntosh apple wall (it’s the national apple of Canada), and food from local restaurants and chefs.
The time slots sold out.
When reached by phone to discuss Milk’s Best of the City win for Best PR Company, Heth was in full Vancouver International Wine Festival mode (her company also handles PR for that behemoth). She had time, though, to chat about her thoughts on activating Vancouver’s imagination.
What’s the thought process to go from, “We want to promote our client’s wines” to “Let’s launch an edible museum”?
Heth: Ha. Right? Constellation Brands is an interesting client for us, because they always look to us for creative solutions. When they came to us in the summer of last year, talking about Canada’s 150th and a lot of their [wine] brands being Canadian, they said, “We want a really big idea to get people talking about these brands in advance of the [wine festival],” and something that’s not just geared towards wine people.
Immediately we started thinking, okay, what do people love in this market, how can we think about how the Vancouver market works, and what do we think will resonate with people?
I’d seen the Museum of Ice Cream in New York, and we had done some work with [co-presenter] Here There YVR before [...] and so we felt he would be a really great partner for something creative.
With a boom in interesting local businesses and entrepreneurs, is PR booming as result?
I feel like PR is changing so much. We’re no longer just the people who “make you famous,” quote unquote. [Laughs] We have to be so much more strategic about content development and assets and, I think, with the changes that are happening in PR and in other bigger cities like New York and LA, they’re becoming more holistic agencies. The agencies that are doing well, and where I hope we sort of fit, are the agencies that are starting to offer content management, photography, micro-sites. It’s not enough now, if you’re working with bigger clients, to just do traditional media relations.
When you say you were thinking about what people love in this market, what do Vancouverites love?
I think, obviously, anything food-related always goes over well. But, at the same time, we didn’t want to just do another wine tasting. And I think that there have been some really interesting activations that have come to the city lately – the Hermès exhibition was really smart, and the Muji pop-up that’s happening right now. I think that this city is hungry for stuff like that. And because these larger luxury brands are taking notice of Vancouver, I think that they see an appetite for this international, global thinking. And so I feel like it’s still a young enough city that when you bring these big ideas here, people get really excited. I think that if you bring something different, people will come.
