Bonnie Hillman 16:11
Well, I mean, everybody feels great when things are going well, and it’s when you start realizing, oh, wow, we have to make payroll and we don’t have enough revenue. And so that happened, and we went through a rough patch when it came to getting business and new business, and I was the main Rainmaker at that time, and so it became very tense. Us working together, and as I said, it was a very small team. We had maybe three or four employees in addition to us. We had moved into smaller offices, and we’re doing everything to manage the expense side, but there was very little expense side other than people. So I initiated. We sat down and tried talking and said, this isn’t really working. Neither one of us are happy as any relationship.
You’d start there, marriage or business, and she wanted to keep working together, and I didn’t, and so I initiated the shotgun. And for those who don’t know, a shotgun is you have a shareholder agreement that basically says, If you want out of this partnership, we were equal partners, which I would never do again, by the way, and I can explain why. Well, you’ll hear why, if you want out of the partnership, you initiate a price. You say to your partner, I will buy you out for x, say, a million dollars. ours wasn’t that, but I’ll buy you out for a million dollars. And that number has to be the exact number that you’d accept. So if they say no, I mean, if you really want out, you’re going to price it in a way that.
Jeremy Weisz 18:02
Forces you to be fair. Yeah, because if you say, I want ten million. Give me ten million I go, No, well then you have to buy it from them for the same exact price.
Bonnie Hillman 18:13
Exactly. And I really didn’t want to keep working together. I didn’t necessarily seek that I was gonna like. I just enjoyed doing what I was doing. I knew that I could run the business alone, so that’s what I did. And I of course, priced it lower because I needed to be fair, and I was incented to have her not be in the business anymore. So it worked.
Jeremy Weisz 18:44
Were you thinking in that sense, okay, will you been okay? If she’s like, okay, I’m buying it from you. I mean, yes. Were you thinking, okay, ultimately I would like to own it. But if not, that’s fine.
Bonnie Hillman 18:55
Yes, exactly. And I mean, I had been in that business longer than she had. So it was a bit of an issue for me, because I thought, well, part of the shotgun agreement was you don’t work in the competitive space for a year. And so what would I do? And then I thought, well, maybe I would just consult or do something else, because I’ve done different things. So absolutely my preference, it forces you to be really clear about what you want and what outcomes you want, which was hard. And I had an informal business coach at the time who knew her as well, and he kept saying, you don’t need to go that high. You don’t need to go that high. But I was thinking, if she turned around and said, I want the business, I’ll pay you. I needed a number that felt okay for me, so that’s what happened.
Jeremy Weisz 19:47
And then, was that an easy conversation? Was she like, okay?
Bonnie Hillman 19:52
No, but again, we had lawyer, we had our own lawyers, and they did it. And no, it was emotional. And we had been friends, so it was, it was pretty emotional for her, but our lawyers, I mean, it was quick, because I think that she, yeah.
Jeremy Weisz 20:14
She has to make a decision. Do I want to keep it or do I not essentially.
Bonnie Hillman 20:18
Exactly, do I want to keep it myself, which for her, she wanted to keep working with me. She didn’t want it alone, and that was what I was sort of banking on, I guess. Or if she had felt confident enough to run the business alone, then I would have been fine. I just wanted out of the relationship. Yeah, so it ended up.
Jeremy Weisz 20:38
Friends and business partners are different. I mean, it’s just a different dynamic. It’s like, it’s not like you don’t like the person. It’s just a different dynamic when you own a company with someone.
Bonnie Hillman 20:48
Yes, and you realize it’s when the chips are down, particularly, like everybody can be gracious and generous when, and a very wise friend of mine said he’s never met two equal partners. Who’ve ever said, oh, yeah, my partner actually contributes more than I do in a business. Everyone always thinks that they’re the ones that are really the thing that drives the business, right? We sort of can’t help it.
Jeremy Weisz 21:15
So you had an interesting first couple years of running the business. Talk about the team for a second, and the evolution of the team, because the time you have like, three or four people, what are some key roles that you put in place over the years that helped with the growth?
Bonnie Hillman 21:33
Yeah, so we, at the time that I took over ownership alone, we had a couple of key clients that, and I had junior staff. It was really all we could afford, I’ll say, less experienced staff. And then really trained them. And I usually was pretty good at finding talented people. And so their roles were mostly working on kind of account service and sponsorship, and I was very involved in the work at that point. I was on all the business, the meetings with clients and that kind of thing. And we had just won Gray Goose Vodka as a client. And even though the budget wasn’t that big, it was a very high profile, exciting, fun project that took us out of the arts and culture ghetto, I’ll say, and I don’t mean that disparagingly, but out of that space and that involved a different kind of work that was initially it was find us arts and cultural properties and events that we can make a difference in and stand out. And that was already in our wheelhouse.
But then, as they did well, and all of a sudden, had a media buy in a lot of other aspects of marketing. I hired a head of PR somebody who had probably 10 years’ experience at that time, who’d worked on beverage alcohol, and she really was the key person to have really kicked off that growth. And because Greg Goose is owned by Bacardi Canada, there were other brands within their portfolio that, because the work that my team did was so good, we won a lot of other business. And we would do everything from PR media partnerships and then a number of events. We would do pop-ups at golf tournaments and worked globally. We were part of a global group of agencies, so we’d be on a call every week with London and New York and LA and Sydney and wherever else they were. And it was very exciting. It really fueled our growth a lot.
And we worked on Great Goose Canada for nine years, and a whole bunch of other brands within the Bacardi portfolio, and probably at that point, I had a team of 15, and six of them worked on Bacardi business. And those were the days when the budgets were bigger and there were a lot of event management. And so my staff then became more of an event XM type of skill set than just media relations and PR.
Jeremy Weisz 24:26
It seems too Bonnie at that time, and we’ll talk about the changes over the years, of where things are going in sponsorship and communications, but at that time, that’s a leap to hire a senior person of 10 years’ experience. What made you decide to take that leap? Because you could have, like you had junior people, so it’s like, you wanted someone more experienced. Was also a tough decision at the time. And what were you thinking at the time?
Bonnie Hillman 24:57
Well, I knew that, I mean, I’ve always approached my work that it’s not rocket science. I’ve worked in and around marketing enough that I can figure things out. But there were specific things that our client was starting to ask for that I knew really needed somebody with experience and I was worth it to me to invest in that, because I figured there’d be a lot more business down the road, and this person came with relationships that she could win business, and she did. So it wasn’t really a tough decision, because I knew that she would really take us to another level.
And I also, I’ve always had the attitude, try it, fix it, do it. Do it. Try it, fix it, do it. So, you know, it’s only money. I crunched my numbers, saw the upside of the existing client work we had, knew that she was a great fit culturally, because that’s always important.
Jeremy Weisz 26:00
How did you find them?
Bonnie Hillman 26:02
Through my network. I don’t remember doing an ad or using a recruiter, but my network was such that I had been connected to her and was impressed with her work and also felt like I could work with her and I could let her do her sing and not have to micromanage, because I don’t like to do that.
Jeremy Weisz 26:24
From a services perspective. Let’s talk about the changes. So it sounds like early on, obviously, you have sponsorship and communications, and the sponsorship was even back then, the main thing communication seems I’ve overtaken now, but you still do a lot of sponsorship. Talk about the sponsorship and how that has changed to today.
Bonnie Hillman 26:48
So back then, we would do a fair, we did a couple of different naming rights, or the before at my time, and a lot of it was arts organizations, almost exclusively who had seasons or major ex-blockbuster exhibitions that were coming and back in that day, mostly the financial sector were the sponsors. You could get a typical so Montreal Museum of Fine Art is doing an Impressionist exhibition, Blockbuster exhibition, paintings are coming there from France and you could sell that sponsorship for $300,000 to any number any different companies in the financial sector. And that was the business we do a couple of those a year. It might be a three-year deal, and then once in a while, there’d be a naming rights deal. What has changed is…
Jeremy Weisz 27:49
How did you get that type of client? I mean, they just know that’s what you do.
Bonnie Hillman 27:54
Yeah, so A&C, or back then it was Arts and Communications counselors was probably the only agency. It was an extension of a New York-based agency with the same name, who really just specialized in arts organizations and selling sponsorship for them, many sponsorship agencies sell sports sponsorships, which is a lot more lucrative and a lot more common, really, to her credit, the founder of our agency, really was the pioneer. She absolutely was the pioneer of arts and cultural sponsorship in Canada that extended to the US too. So she had worked with pretty much every museum and performing arts organization across Canada. So we get inbound requests all the time that we would turn away because they weren’t big enough or they were more philanthropic.
What’s changed over the years is we still do have some arts and cultural projects. Artworks to was one, which was the city of Toronto during Covid, decided to do a massive public art campaign to make art accessible for everybody who were locked in and locked down during Covid, and we brought them over $2 million of sponsorship through Primarily the developer community, which was quite a feat, because developers are not necessarily the first ones in to sponsor things and spend money that way. And so we’re particularly proud of that. They got a lot of eyeballs. It was a marketing exercise, not a philanthropic one, which sponsorship always is, but often we know that brands get confused because they think of arts and culture as a philanthropic exercise, and our role is to find the value in the arts organizations from a marketing standpoint.
And so we did that recently, but our work has actually evolved the sponsorship work into, I’ll say, unconventional properties. So we work with municipality cities on finding new ways for them to generate revenue using a sponsorship template. So Union Station is Canada’s largest transit hub. They were undergoing a massive renovation that many train stations and transit hubs across North America are undergoing, and the developer who had the lease with the City of Toronto, reached out through our network and said, I’m thinking of maybe trying on sponsorship as a way to generate revenue on top of advertising and retail. And we held hands with him and his team, and for almost a year, figured out how to carve out a sponsorship value prop for brands. And we went with the financial sector to start because that was the richest field, not just because they have the money, but because it’s a, really a regulated industry where the branding and their marketing needs to differentiate them, because the products really can’t.
And so we devised a way to not cannibalize advertising opportunities there, but create a fulsome package for a financial institution that included a retail location and included advertising. A big chunk of advertising included different activations, but mostly it was about exclusivity. That’s at the core of sponsorship. That’s why people pay naming rights fees to block out competition, and that was a hurdle. It’s a city-owned property. Exclusivity in cities generally don’t like to go together. Cities are for everyone and every brand and every company, and so the trick was to make sure that the process of finding a sponsor was fair. And so we approached proactively. We didn’t have to do a formal RFP request for proposal, as you would if it were really a city. This was the developer looking for sponsorship, that the revenue would flow to both the city, the developer, and actually the province, in this case of Ontario. And the process was very fair.
We approached every possible financial institution in Canada and offered them the same information, the same opportunity to do a hardhat tour during the renovation, and in the meantime, we created that we do valuations for our client. That’s one of the pieces of the work where we work with media buyers and figure out the changing values of things like out-of-home and banners and eyeballs and Wi-Fi and all those things that marketers try to put value on and we have a proprietary way of valuing these opportunities through media, but other things, so a retail location, and then accessibility is a premium on top of that. And we got responses from the five biggest banks in Canada.
And then really, I’ll say, the flame, the kind of guiding light for us, or our North Star, was which partner, which financial institution, is going to make the experience of the person in Union Station, the commuter, the neighbor, the office worker who comes there for lunch, the best. And so who’s going to enhance the space, over and above the money they’re going to pay, who will actually do the most for the City of Toronto in terms of adding, enhancing the value?
And it was TD Bank, and they’ve been an incredible partner. It’s a beautiful thing, an example of a really interesting first of its kind. We did research all over the world to see if anything like this exists in other train stations. And there is grand central station in New York that has some sponsors for their Christmas market, things like that, but nothing like this, exactly. Thank you that it’s ubiquitous. It’s long term and TD has done an incredible job bringing value. So they host this union summer where they bring a lot of musicians that they work with in other areas that they work with. They work a lot with music.
Jeremy Weisz 34:37
It’s really an ongoing relationship. It’s not like, okay, we’re gonna put your banner up and stop. It’s a constant thinking of ways to integrate TD into the ecosystem there and to add value to them, and also the state Union Station too.
Bonnie Hillman 34:56
Exactly, exactly.
Jeremy Weisz 34:59
I’m curious. Is the expectations of the sponsor. I mean, the value for the space is pretty obvious. It’s like found money. I mean, you put this up, you do this and, and there’s a couple things that go through my head. I’m wondering, what does your outreach look like to other companies like I obviously easily see you go to Union Station in Chicago and go, hey, we got $3 million for Union Station. I mean, it seems like a pretty easy value proposition conversation. We got $3 million or whatever amount of money, millions of dollars for this, doing this. Do you want us to run the same thing for you, because you’re not doing anything and you can make an extra $3 million. Do you do a constant outreach to like, every union state, or whatever, across the US or?
Bonnie Hillman 35:52
Yes, so we have done it, and here’s what we’ve learned. So we have approached Chicago Union Station, and we’ve approached the new Moynihan train Hall in New York City, and on and on. And Washington, DC is renovating their union station. We have because we’re in business, and we have this amazing case study. The issue is, who controls this piece of it, and in each case, it’s very different. The reason this worked, and I’m going to kind of nerd out on marketing, but the reason this one worked, and we’ve learned why it’s harder in other areas, is because the developer was the one who was in control of the commercial activity in Union Station, not the city, because cities have way different protocols. So if the city is still operating the organization, then there has to be an RFP.
There has to be a lot, so that’s one barrier. The other one is the developers, very, very smart, kept control of the advertising assets, and that’s how we could offer exclusivity. Many of these projects farm out to a third party, not just the ability to sell the advertising, but the actual assets are owned by the third party, and the third party doesn’t want to give exclusivity, because they see it as a way of cannibalizing advertising, even though we made sure that that wasn’t the case. But the ownership of the assets, advertising assets and marketing assets are the key, and a number of these projects don’t have that. So yes, we have, we’ve had conversations with others.
Jeremy Weisz 37:42
You can reach out and be like, okay, here’s the case study. You want to do this for you, which seems like a very easy position, no brainer, but the qualifying question is, who’s controlling this? And if they are, it’s not like you can’t do it. It’s just a way different process. It may not work the exact same. And so that question of who owns it really kind of signals to you this is going to be much easier for both parties to do
Bonnie Hillman 38:13
Exactly. And I think that the advantage to them to have the third party own the assets is that most cities are cash-strapped, and most of these projects go over budget. And so if they’ve got a third party willing to invest the money to put the assets, up, the digital boards, and all of those things, of course, most mayors and cities would say, of course, we’re going to do that because we’re trying to do other things there. So that’s what we found. And also, everybody was at different stages of development, and some of it was too early and some of it was too late, or we’re continuing to do it, though, and we have done another deal in Calgary, a city in Canada.
Jeremy Weisz 39:00
I was going to bring up the Calgary Transit is that.
Bonnie Hillman 39:02
Yes, Calgary Transit, and it coincidentally was TD again, but we approached that one was an RFP process because this was the city running it, and Calgary Transit has the downtown core, where the mostly office buildings and a lot of the high-end shopping is, is a free zone. And so it was a natural to have a sponsor say, okay, we’ve sponsored the free zone. And so you could see, if anybody’s watching, the free zone was branded with banners. In this case, Calgary doesn’t control all the assets in the same way, but we managed to work around with that. It’s just a little bit harder, and the value gets increased if they can control the assets and promise complete exclusivity.
Jeremy Weisz 39:55
What’s interesting is, TD’s gonna double down on what works, right? So if I go, it’s working. And so you not only bring, okay, we can do this for you, but we bring a list of companies we’ve already vetted right before that are interested, even if it’s not. TD, it’s a number of other companies. So it seems like a no-brainer. It’s like TD, yeah, just have a sponsor every transit system across if it’s working. What’s the expectation of a TD or any other company coming in of what’s a win for them so that obviously you come to them, yeah, let’s just do the Calgary Transit. Let’s keep doing this over and over again.
Bonnie Hillman 40:36
It depends on what their objectives are in any market. I mean, in that particular case, TD wanted to have a bigger presence in Calgary and so what their expectation was really about gaining greater awareness, obviously, all the things that anybody wants, more customers, more interaction with customers, more ways to show that we’re here for good, that kind of thing. I think the expectations are always very, very specific to the brands that we work with. Why they’re doing certain things. We do our homework ahead of time to make sure that we have one or two key things that we believe we see they’re trying to do. My other example of naming rights is Meridian Credit Union, which I was on a dog walk with my dog and lived downtown Toronto at the time, and saw that a Credit Union Meridian, which had been outside of the city had opened a branch, and we had been working on Teal Live is the name of an organization that’s linked to the city of Toronto that owns three theaters in the city.
Owned theaters, and they both produce and manage the venues, and we had been hired by them to find Sony had been the naming rights partner to this building before it’s called the Sony Center, and Sony was not renewing their naming rights deal. And then we were hired to find a new naming rights partner. And I saw that Meridian had started to put a little paw print in downtown Toronto, and thought, well, this could be interesting, because the vision of this organization and what would go on in this theater was about community. And credit unions are all about communities and making things accessible. And so we approached them, and there were two theaters at that time that we were starting with, selling one, and they came back and said this is really up our alley. And we care about this geographic location also. How much would it be to do both? And so they named both theaters.
Jeremy Weisz 43:03
And you can see the result, if you’re looking at the screen here, I think it says providing over 30 million funding over the life of the agreement, which is pretty significant for that company.
Bonnie Hillman 43:13
And arts organization, yeah, exactly. And for that company, exactly. And the only reason we have this year, it’s because it’s a city-owned property. It’s public knowledge. I can’t share the Union Station one because it’s for private, but it’s more than this, but this one we’re allowed to share.
Jeremy Weisz 43:33
I’m actually shocked that more companies don’t, I don’t know, say yes or it seems like a very amazing value prop, going to these and showing them this case study and just saying, let’s figure out a way to make it happen, no matter what red tape. But talk about the negotiation part for a second, and some of the things that you’ve learned over the years from negotiation because this is, we’re not talking about like $1,000 we’re not talking about a million dollars. Something is we’re something. We’re talking millions, 10s of millions of dollars. So what are some of the things you’re thinking of from a negotiation standpoint, that maybe an example you’ve come across and how you’ve navigated through these tough negotiations.
Bonnie Hillman 44:19
So it always starts with us really doing our homework about values. I mean, we pride ourselves on not going to market with what we believe would be a really unrealistic number, number one. So like a good real estate agent who comes into your house, if you’ve ever sold a house, and they do a whole inventory of your assets. What have you got? Is it two car garage, three car garage you got? What do you have? Has the kitchen been renovated? And then you look at comparables, how any other in your neighborhood, who’s it’s a very similar process. So, the negotiation starts with us doing a really realistic valuation. We’ve been doing it for long enough we know the marketers that we talk to are going to do their own and we are doing it the way they would. So our clients aren’t always happy. We come back, they say to us, oh, I was hoping it would be double. Well, this is like anybody you’re selling your house, and there’s ego, there’s all kinds of stuff.
So that’s the first negotiation, quite honestly, is me saying to our client, we love you. We wouldn’t have taken this on if we didn’t think we could sell it. We think you’re an incredibly valuable property, and this is what the market will manage. We always go a little bit higher to leave room for negotiation. We know that everyone loves a deal and feel like they’re getting a deal, but we start with that initial valuation and the thinking that goes into the valuation. And so when we are pitching these things, we ground the conversation in that, it’s not airy fairies is such a worthy thing, and it’s really about these are the eyeballs. These are ways we think through ways that they could activate based on things they do already in any given market. So it starts there. And I always say to my team, the main objective that first meeting is, and the first email that goes out saying we want to talk to you is they actually respect the process and know that this is a real thing, that this is not flaky, and then so inevitably we hear, well, it’s a really great opportunity.
We don’t have that kind of money, but we’ve learned how to really separate out people that are just kicking tires to the brands that actually are looking for something and are in the snack bracket to afford that. It’s a very select number of companies, as you’d imagine. So it’s not like we’re having to do this with even 60. I mean, when we’re talking about multi-million dollar sponsorships in Canada. There’s really, you know, a handful of companies that could do that, maybe more than maybe two handfuls. But we always look to so that’s the first part. And then when it comes to the negotiation, which invariably, it does, we negotiate on behalf of our client unless they already had a relationship, or they have a board member who’s very connected to whomever we’re negotiating with. We also the other piece to kind of set the table for a strong negotiation is we start as high as we feel like is reasonable.
If you go too high, like I do know some CEOs, they’re going to automatically bounce it down something like this, unless it’s so major, you don’t start with the CEO. We’ll start with a CMO or a VP of marketing. They, of course, have to bring in a whole team, and that’s the trajectory. And then everybody reviews the valuation, and sometimes they’ll come back to us with their valuation, or their agency has done evaluation and it’s lower than ours. I mean, I’ve never had somebody come back and say, oh, it’s higher. Oh, wait, we’re willing to pay you more. But sometimes they don’t even do that. They say, this sounds great. And I mean, it’s never that fast. And so really we, in one of the cases, the CEO really clicked with the CEO of the other brand, so he was involved in some of the negotiation. It felt like the appropriate thing to do. But we can mix, and it’s a casting job.
We figure out who’s going to represent this side better than others. We tend to do it because we are sort of a trusted broker on both sides. The brands know us. We’ve been selling sponsorships for years in this market, and even if there are some new people, we can refer to a deal we’ve done or whatever, and so they can be honest with us and not feel like they’re going to hurt our feelings, just like a real estate broker. And it’s a similar process where they’ll make an offer, and if we think it’s reasonable, we’ll come back to our client and say, well, we can do this, and then let’s rearrange that might leave room for us getting another sponsor at a lower level and or maybe we’ll take out a piece of the exclusivity.
So, for example, with financial services, sometimes they’ll want to block insurance if they’ve got an insurance arm. Well, if they’re not going to pay the full top, we’ll say, okay, great. You want to come in low. We’re taking out insurance, and that leaves room to make up the sort of the difference.
Jeremy Weisz 49:50
No thanks for sharing that, Bonnie, because I could see how, first of all, sharing the process, like, here’s the process we’re looking at, and then actually doing a lot of due diligence on each of the pieces of the process and sharing it takes out a lot of the rest of the, gonna say, negotiation, but it’s like we’ve done the comps here, and here’s what it is, and then if they don’t want to pay it, and then you talk just different terms of way that company can make up for the difference. Because obviously, if it’s, this is the value of it, this is the value of it. So you come out from a really, like facts, really statistics, metrics perspective, which, there’s some leeway, but not tons, in the process, right?
Bonnie Hillman 50:37
Right? Exactly.
Jeremy Weisz 50:38
I know we have just a minute or so. I would love to have you if you have another minute, just to talk about the communication side, there was an interesting case you did with Johnny Walker. I don’t know if you have a couple minutes or two.
Bonnie Hillman 50:51
I do for sure, and this was a while ago. But why I love talking about it is because it shows my team’s thinking, which isn’t just in a traditional trajectory of okay, the client gives you a brief, and it’s about PR. We want PR. This particular brief was Johnny Walker’s owned by Diageo, and we were lucky enough, after our gray goose Bacardi business, we won some business with Diageo. And the brief was, we want to reach 30-something badge drinkers, which are 30 men who go to a bar and to impress either their friends or women or want to be friends, will order a drink that has a cachet. So most of the research showed that those guys are drinking single malt scotch because they think it has more cachet than a blended scotch. And I think that’s still true today. By the way.
Jeremy Weisz 51:55
I order something that’s like flaming with an umbrella, typically, so opposite of that.
Bonnie Hillman 51:55
Great, yeah, and how did that work for you? Was it good?
Jeremy Weisz 52:08
Definitely.
Bonnie Hillman 52:09
Yeah, good. So we thought about, no amount of advertising was actually going to change these people’s minds because so again, the research, and because we had really great research from our client, showed that actually, when people tasted the liquid, they were impressed. And it’s smooth, and especially for a younger drinker, single malt can be a lot and a blended Scotch is a lot smoother. So we came up with an idea to do, and again, it had nothing to do with traditional PR or even media to create these at home tasting programs, because if the tasting was going to be the thing, and there was some kind of cachet that was attached to it, then we could win that demographic. And so we, at that time, this is sort of pre-influencer, or say, capital I influencer, we used our network to find people who’d be willing to host a Johnny Walker tasting in their home.
Tag it on to a dinner party. Tag it on to a football game, even if you’re having a bunch of people over, tag it on to anything else. And we will send them to the brand ambassadors. We bring the glassware, we bring the Johnny Walker. We’ll supply some snacks, but we’ll bring some, and we’ll walk you through a 55-minute hasting. It was very expensive and it was, as you’d imagine, really time-intensive. We worked with an XM agency who specialized in this, but we were the leaders of this from the strategic point of view to the actual execution. We were the concierges. So as people booked these things, and it was across Canada, in foreign markets, we then expanded it to corporations on a Thursday afternoon, having a group of their staff come in and do this.
And it was wildly successful, because it really did, if A, it was also early-ish days of social media, so it was very Instagram-worthy. People took a lot of pictures and shared it and posted them with their friends. The setup was beautiful, that the glassware was beautiful, the host got a bottle, I mean, and we customized it. If it were really high-end, if it were a CEO hosting this in his or her home, we’d have the highest end of the Johnny Walker banners, the blue and the black. If it were younger, and they would just entry-level drinkers, we would go with that. It was wildly successful. They saw a major spike in sales at that time, and really set the stage for a blended Scotch to have its place next to single mom.
Jeremy Weisz 55:13
There’s so much to unpack there. I know we have limited time, but I love that. I think anyone could use that lesson in their business, as far as really brand ambassadors, choosing brand ambassadors, I could see, okay, you have whoever it is. It could be a famous athlete, artist, actor. You get whatever. I don’t know why sports is popping in my brain, but you get basketball player hosting a bunch of their friends at a tasting. Everything’s free. It’s basically, they’re, you know, promoting the product a little bit because it’s there, but or CEOs going to corporations and doing whatever the service or product is with these brand ambassador activations, or whoever the best buyer is, I guess, activation so I love that idea for any company, just to think of who’s a good brand ambassador, and how do you involve them? It may not be like a tasting of their house, but how do you involve them in some form or fashion.
Bonnie Hillman 56:13
Exactly. And it’s harder and harder to do now than it was then, because social media has made this very, very common now, and so you’d have to really have something of real high value to make somebody want to do it. But I think that the lesson for me, and why I still talk about it, even though it’s at least 10 years old, is that it forced us to think about what is the problem we’re solving differently, and we don’t have to stay in one lane of media relations ever. And fortunately, I have a team that’s nimble in their thinking.
Jeremy Weisz 56:50
Yeah, no, I love about what you said, because everything’s digital. I mean, so much is digital now, like someone could do a post on something, but going back to in-person is actually novel, again, like, what if, yeah, they could do a post and video about it, but what if someone did something in person with the person’s staff or team? It’s novel, right? So I love going back to that. But Bonnie, thank you. Thanks for sharing lessons, stories from your journey. I want to encourage everyone to check out acteam.ca poke around your website and just really appreciate you sharing. Everyone check it out and we’ll see you next time. Bonnie, thanks so much.
Bonnie Hillman 57:36
Thank you, Jeremy.
