When Cohn & Wolfe was called in to launch a literary awards program to tout the Upper Canada microbrewery to the Canadian literary community, it used the diminutive size of
the brewery to get super-sized results. Getting attention for a brand new literary prize during the fall of 2000, when new books were released for the holiday season and the Nobel
Prize for Literature was announced, was no easy task. In addition, "the largest author festival in the world took place in Toronto in October, and it would have been easier to get
coverage if we didn't have that going on," Cohn & Wolfe's Janet Harron notes.
The team focused on the fact that the award is the only one given specifically for short stories, and repeatedly played up the "small is beautiful" theme by leveraging the
happy coincidence that many of the semifinalists were published by small, independent literary houses. The underdog method worked, garnering widespread media coverage in Canada,
and even better, endearing the new prize to the literary community, which affectionately termed it "The Swiller" (a humorous comparison to The Giller Prize, one of Canada's most
prestigious literary prizes).