Arts
Substance PR the freelance team for your business
We’ve worked with arts organisation A Space, handling the publicity for its annual ArtVaults exhibition.
Over a six-week period, visitors to the exhibition saw contemporary art from new and established artists across ten sites in Southampton’s old town, including many underground vaults. Our work gave ArtVaults its most successful exhibition to date, with a record 19,000 visitors – more than double the previous number. This made it one of the south’s most popular art events in recent times. Part of our publicity drive involved organising and writing weekly ArtVaults features that appeared in the Southern Daily Echo, focusing on a different artist each time. We also organised TV and radio coverage, contributed articles in industry magazines and listings in entertainment publications including The Guardian Guide.
EAT Southampton was Southampton’s first arts festival. We worked alongside founders Mick Smith and Stuart Bedford, the city’s universities and council to help raise the profile of Southampton’s creative talent through this event. EAT, which stands for Emerging Artistic Talent, took place in the city centre over the May bank holiday weekend.
We worked with local newspaper the Southern Daily Echo to secure daily coverage of EAT in the four weeks leading up to the festival. For this, we interviewed bands, artists, organisers and local businesses to develop a series of articles the paper used. This also included profiles on some of the artists running workshops. The Echo also published the EAT map – an illustrated guide to the weekend. To build as much interest in EAT as possible, we secured TV and radio coverage in the run-up to the event. This included teaming up with a popular local radio station to feature live interviews and music from some of the bands in the line-up. Posters up around the city’s bars, shops and restaurants also helped draw attention. On the weekend itself, BBC radio and TV broadcast live from EAT.
The result was a fantastic three days. With live music, visual art workshops and performance art in the city centre, EAT helped promote the realisation that Southampton’s creative industry is growing by the day.
Mick Smith says: “EAT Southampton was a real challenge, not only because nothing like this had ever been attempted in the city before, but also because of the extremely tight timescale, with three months from conception to delivery. Substance PR rose to this challenge admirably, supplying and working an extensive and extremely relevant media list and achieving a great deal of quality coverage in a very short time. The fact that an estimated 6000 people attended the EAT activities over the bank holiday weekend is testament to the effectiveness of Substance PR’s marketing and public relations strategy and their skill and tenacity in putting it into practice. I would use them again tomorrow.”
Southampton City Council hired us to produce The Big Bang! – an event celebrating the city’s creative industries and the opening of new studio space and a media centre for local artists.
We organised the invitations, catering, sourced and briefed the speakers and wrote a special brochure documenting the development of the creative industries in Southampton. We also devised a media campaign that secured coverage and interviews in artists’ magazines, local newspapers and radio.
Henry Pavey, Strategic Partnerships Manager at Southampton City Council, says: “At all times, I found Substance PR professional in approach and also encouraging with ‘out of the box’ ideas and new concepts. They were a pleasure to work with.”
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