VANCOUVER - When Vancouver publicist Marnie Wilson worked with Dame Edna, she was quietly asked to play detective.

Barry Humphries, the Australian comedian who performs as the outrageous Dame Edna Everage, had Wilson dig up a quirky bit of trivia on each reporter on Dame Edna's publicity schedule. The Dame, of course, lost no time in using the information to best comic and personal advantage during each media interview.

"It was very effective and fun," said Wilson, owner of The Artsbiz Public Relations.

Things don't always run so smoothly. Working on Live Nation's Pemberton Festival, for instance, entailed publicizing entertainers such as Coldplay, JayZ and Tom Petty from a tent in a farmer's field so dusty that Wilson's computers and printers were constantly jammed up.

"The expectations and pressure were enormous from all sides," Wilson said.

After 10 years in the business of publicizing the arts, Wilson has learned a thing or two about getting her message out.

"I have learned over the years how to give a good pitch based on what I know about each individual media person," she said. "I attempt to make their job as easy as possible so they can help me with mine."

Sometimes public relations takes a good helping of creative audacity. Not many consumers know that Cirque de Soleil's musicians respond instantly to every missed cue or acrobatic fall by adjusting what they play -- they might play a line a few extra times, or suddenly jump to another part of a song. When Wilson was pitching a journalist with an interest in music, she arranged for the journalist to sit fully visible on stage, with the musicians, during a live show.

"It was something Cirque had never done before," Wilson said. "It was an effective way to match up the interests of the journalist with the need to get out a story about the show."

When another Wilson client, the show Cavalia, comes to Vancouver in late March, there will be even more opportunities for creative publicity -- in addition to acrobats and performers, the show also features 49 horses.

Wilson sees her job as finding something of interest to each individual journalist, conveying it in the simplest, most straightforward way possible, then "getting them everything they need as quickly as they need it and that means getting them all the right facts -- the who, what, where, when -- some sort of great visual, a good spokesperson, and then it's follow up, follow up, follow up," she said.

A little more than a dozen publicists do most of the arts and entertainment work in Vancouver, Wilson said. Most are one-person businesses that work alone or in a network of other publicists.

Even though much communication between publicist and media are now online and social media has really picked up speed, Wilson says mainstream media outlets still remain the go-to source of information for many consumers, and hence a key focus for her.

"Mainstream media are still important and relevant," Wilson said. "Maybe it's just me being the older generation, but I think that when we focus on one particular aspect and leave the other behind, you're excluding possibilities. Print media are embracing online coverage so when I talk to print media, they are also putting something online, and that's something I can put up on my Facebook page."

"There are more and more people like my in-laws who are on Facebook -- they are in their 70s -- but they are not looking for information on arts and entertainment events," Wilson said. "They are just looking for pictures of their grandkids."

Wilson said she approaches small and large clients the same way. "What the arts are about is what makes us human, so trying to publicize even the small event can be attractive to many media outlets," she said.

Wilson originally trained in physical therapy but moved into publicity while promoting her husband visual artist David Wilson's work. "If you're not organized, that can lead to all sorts of problems. There's a lot of balls in the air. Timelines and task lists."

Wilson is working with Vitaly Medvedovsky, a young artist in his late 20s currently showing at Winsor Gallery. Medvedovsky's technical abilities with colour and gestural work are exciting for people in the art scene, Wilson said, but she needed to find a storyline with broader appeal.

She decided to pitch not the complexity of his work, but the impact on the artist of leaving the U.S.S.R., which then dissolved. "Being able to talk more about how he embraces memory and identity is how I'd like to talk about his work, rather than get into any particular details about what he trained in and his technical side of things," Wilson said.

Wilson's gut feeling is that competition between media outlets is stronger than it was 10 years ago. More than ever, journalists are stressing their need for a unique angle on each story, Wilson said. One pitch is not good enough for everyone.

At the same time, print media in particular are focusing on having an online component and that means a constant need for new content, which gives Wilson an ideal opportunity to provide information incrementally.

jennylee@vancouversun.com