There’s a new PR and content development shop in town. Emily Ward and Jess Hunichen have opened Shine, which launched as a Tag member agency. Shine will provide communications programs for Tag’s clients, while also growing its own client base.
Ward and Hunichen met at Tag, where they were freelance PR consultants. Ward has been a freelancer since 2011 and prior to that was a senior consultant at DDB Public Relations. Hunichen held various PR roles in her native Australia.
Hunichen said she and Ward saw how well Tag’s agency-partnership model worked and decided to form their own agency. Over the past three years, Tag has grown its services through agency partnerships and acquisitions, including the Adlib Group in 2012 and the recent addition of 2Social.
“That model works really well for Tag and 2Social and knowing Tag was trying to grow their PR offering, we thought it was a good opportunity for us to be that agency that could offer PR services,” said Hunichen. “It allows us to grow as Shine, but it also allows Tag to expand and develop their PR offering as well.”
Tag CEO Matt Orlando said he has been building a content practice and putting content at the core of the agency. “It becomes the fuel for all our creative briefs, our execution briefs, our PR strategy,” he said.
“With that in mind, PR was a bit of a missing link for us in that we needed to round out that content discipline. We had content development and the social team in place… and we were missing that PR component.
“We had been working with Emily and Jess for quite some time so we decided to develop some autonomy with Shine as the PR agency,” said Orlando. “It allows that to be the third-leg to this content practice that we’ve been trying to build.”
But why not just hire some full-time PR people? Orlando said he thought about it, but retaining talent in this industry is “near impossible,” though he said some Tag employees have been there for 15 to 20 years.
“Partnerships like this allow us to create that sustainability that we’re after,” said Orlando. “You can hire a PR person today and they could be gone in six months. But bringing someone like Emily and Jess on with a vested interest in [Tag] keeps them here for a long time. There’s an opportunity for us to actually develop a team without the fear of losing key components.”
