An Interesting Mix: Fine Art Auctions and PR

Last week Heffel Fine Art Auction House conducted a live auction sale of $21.8-million in Fine Canadian Art. It was the second biggest art auction in Canadian history and another huge success for the Heffel brothers. The Heffels’ ongoing success and rapid rise in the art world offers significant lessons about the value of a proactive PR campaign.

Back in 1999, the Heffel brothers were in the early years of their auction business and had never held a live auction that surpassed the $1.3-million mark. When I first met the Heffels, I was excited about just how much story potential they had. Here were two energetic guys in their 30s who understood art and were willing to use the Internet and non-traditional media and communications to sell art to an otherwise conservative and traditional clientele. Together, we crafted a strategic communications plan designed to tell the Heffels’ unique story to Canadian media.

At the time, it was a David versus Goliath story. In the late 1990s, Heffel was a small western auction house compared to the well established eastern houses. Within a few years of strong media coverage and steadily increasing revenues, the Heffels pulled even with the eastern competitor’s sales totals. They invested in their business by buying gallery buildings in Montreal and Toronto’s Yorkville neighbourhood. By 2005, the Heffels had pulled past their Canadian rivals and established themselves as Canada’s leading fine art auction house. They never looked back.

In June 2007, a record $23-million sale was achieved at the Heffel’s spring auction in Vancouver, setting a new benchmark for the Canadian fine art auction industry. With the revenues of their monthly online art auctions and the live fall auction, the Heffels had an unprecedented $50-million year.

Even in June 2009, when the economic downturn presented challenges to garnering media attention for fine art, Peak’s media pitching resulted in 135 stories across Canada, and 15 price records were broken at the annual spring auction.

How did the Heffels’ dramatic success happen? The Heffel brothers acknowledge that PR is one of their secret weapons. Over the past decade, we’ve worked closely with them to implement an in-depth media relations campaign with two goals: secure widespread publicity in advance of the semi-annual live art auctions (to fuel buyer interest) and publicize the results of the auctions afterwards (to create consigner confidence and interest).

The key to success and national pickup of many of these stories has been our ability to identify the “Cinderella stories” surrounding the art up for auction. These are the rags to riches stories you hear about on programs like “Antiques Roadshow.” They make for great feature pieces in newspapers, which often publish full-page spreads detailing how art by the likes of Tom Thomson was passed through generations without anyone realizing the huge value of the painting that hung on their wall.

Our success is also due to persistence and relationships. Year after year, the team at Peak Communicators manages to deliver some of the best art business stories to media across the country. When contacting reporters on our targeted media lists, people know who we are and that the story we’re pitching is solid and interesting. Sometimes it’s tempting for PR pitchers not to persist in following up with media if they aren’t getting a response. That’s not how we work here at Peak. Leading up to an auction, we keep phoning until we get through and can deliver a verbal pitch that highlight the news angle relevant to them. On the night of a sale, we make sure to send a news release following the conclusion of the auction so all media have the information needed to do a piece on the sale results.

Our media results speak for themselves. Around Heffel’s live spring auction this year, Peak garnered 32 newspaper stories, 16 pieces of broadcast coverage and 150 online hits to date. The hit list for this campaign has stretched to 260 pages of coverage.

Heffel has also become the first Canadian auction house to engage online followers. On Heffels’ behalf, Peak provided live tweeting during the auction last month, turning out around 100 tweets in a night.

Not bad for an art auction.