In the middle of the 1990s, Heidi Lowell was helping to publicize one of the loudest products in technology: Microsoft Windows 95. The launch had a Rolling Stones song, midnight store openings and enough attention to make software feel like a summer blockbuster. Yet the assignment that redirected her career was quieter. Microsoft owned Softimage, whose tools let artists build the kinds of computer-generated worlds that were only beginning to appear on screens. Lowell met the people behind those worlds and recognized an uncommon combination - engineers with an artist's eye, artists with an engineer's patience.
She had found her people. In 1998, she founded Liaison in Portland and aimed it at 3D. This was a peculiar niche at the time. "3D" did not yet mean a button on every design app or a virtual set on the evening news. It meant specialized software, expensive workstations and a small tribe of people who knew why polygons mattered. The bet was not simply that the industry would grow. It was that the industry would keep producing ideas that needed translation.
“There's something about the blend of intelligence and creativity that 3D artists possess that I found really attractive. I knew that their stories were the stories that I wanted to tell.”Heidi Lowell, founder of Liaison
01 / The premiseThe product was never publicity. It was comprehension.
Liaison is a public relations and digital marketing agency, but that description hides the useful part. Its clients make rendering software, motion-capture systems, virtual-production tools, holographic displays and other things that invite a fatal opening sentence: “It is a platform that enables...” Liaison's job is to find the human consequence before the reader leaves.
The agency sells strategy, positioning, media relations, product launches, event support, content, search optimization, social programs and paid campaigns. The customer can be a startup coming out of stealth or a familiar name such as Autodesk, Epic Games, NVIDIA, Wacom, Digital Domain or Chaos. The common trait is not size. It is explanatory friction. Someone must connect a technical capability to the film shot, building, broadcast, game or sales result it makes possible.
Clarify
Run the messaging workshop. Decide what changes for the customer and which claim the product can prove.
Inspect
Audit the website, search position, competitors, social channels and the press already covering the category.
Demonstrate
Build demos, customer examples, interviews, useful articles and visuals that make the technology concrete.
Distribute
Match each proof point to the right press, search query, event, social audience or paid campaign.
That order matters. Publicity applied to a fuzzy proposition merely distributes confusion. Liaison's Avalon Holographics campaign began with a messaging workshop, media training, SEO and social audits, and a website redesign. Only then did the agency bring the company to San Francisco for a week of demonstrations and meetings with outlets including The Wall Street Journal, CNET and VentureBeat. The brief was compressed into three months because Avalon was preparing for a $50 million funding round. The most portable lesson is almost annoyingly sensible: repair the explanation before buying the attention.
02 / The evidenceA specialist should be able to show its homework.
PR case studies often end with a cloud of favorable adjectives. Liaison's better examples contain arithmetic. For volumetric-video company Arcturus, the agency analyzed the site and its competitors, developed search-led articles and paired them with ongoing press work. In a few months, the site ranked highly for almost 20 keywords. For one phrase, “create volumetric videos,” it moved from position 99 to position five. Optimized pages added roughly 300 visits a month and overall traffic rose 30 percent.
Ncam, a maker of real-time camera-tracking systems, presented a different version of the same problem. Insiders knew the product; a crowded market did not. Liaison created a biweekly blog and social program around topics people were already trying to understand, from in-camera visual effects to virtual production. Liaison says three posts reached Google's first page within four months, one target rose from position 100 to six, and site traffic increased 32 percent - about 1,800 extra visits a month.
The important distinction is that the article, social post and press pitch are not separate little chores. Each reinforces the explanation. Search catches a buyer with a question. Editorial coverage supplies outside credibility. Social distribution keeps the proof moving. The agency is paid to coordinate those pieces through projects and ongoing engagements; it offers a rate card on request rather than publishing prices.
03 / The interruptionThen the front door closed.
One campaign makes the operating logic particularly visible because the original plan became impossible. A Portland-area real-estate company had hired Liaison to turn architectural renderings, a virtual-reality bike ride and a new community into social content. In six months, followers rose 60 percent, engagement 65 percent, and reach and impressions 145 percent. Then COVID-19 arrived. Oregon locked down. Buyers who expected to tour property could no longer walk through it.
The failure came first and physically: no tour, no familiar sales ritual. Liaison switched the format rather than the objective. Facebook Live programs supplied a host and a moment. 360-degree tours supplied spatial context. Targeted paid social supplied distribution. Over six months, the campaign generated 856 leads and nearly 8,000 site visits, according to the agency. What changed was not the message - come imagine yourself here - but the evidence used to make that message believable.
When a channel disappears, list the jobs it performed. The property tour created urgency, answered spatial questions and moved a prospect toward contact. Live video, 360 imagery and a targeted form replaced those jobs one by one.
04 / The moatTwenty-five years is a database no rival can download.
A general technology agency can study a camera tracker before a kickoff call. Liaison already knows which broadcast journalists care about latency, which VFX artists distrust a business-first pitch, which conference creates serious meetings and which dazzling demo is merely dazzling. That context compounds. The agency worked with Allegorithmic for about a decade as its Substance tools became standard across AAA game studios. When Liaison proposed a retrospective to 3D Artist, it could assemble executives, customers, practical tips, a tutorial and images into a five-page editorial package. The story worked because the agency knew the product's largest asset was not a feature. It was the users' devotion.
The same specialization also sets a boundary. This playbook is strongest when a company has a substantive product, credible users and demonstrable outcomes but lacks a clear narrative. It has much less to work with when differentiation is only a slogan, leadership cannot spare time for evidence, or the audience is so broad that category knowledge adds little. Fluency can reveal the good story. It cannot manufacture the underlying proof.
“The 3D world has a great way of striking down messages that feel more business than artist-driven.”Heidi Lowell
Liaison now works across film, games, architecture, engineering, live events, broadcast, virtual reality and AI. The list sounds less like a niche than a map of modern visual culture. Yet the original thesis has held. A new tool can be technically correct, beautifully engineered and almost impossible to explain. Between the maker and the market sits a person asking the oldest question in communication: what, exactly, changes for me?
Lowell built a company around answering it. The clever part was choosing a field where the answer keeps changing.