by Penny, Laura
Bernays didn’t open his New York office until 1919, but he was a far more diligent archivist, and a more enthusiastic booster for PR, than Lee. Bernays wrote extensively on the subject of PR and taught the first university course in PR, at New York University, in 1923. Bernays, of all the early PR men, was most committed to doing PR for PR. Moreover, Bernays outlived all his contemporaries, dying in 1995 at the ripe age of 103. He continued to lecture, give interviews, and open up his archives to PR students until his death, and witnessed the transformation of PR into the multibillion-dollar business it is today.
Bernays started out doing flak for the ballet, even though he hated dance, and then went to work for the U.S. Committee for Public Information, the government’s press agency during the war effort. When World War I ended, Bernays began working for American Tobacco, the makers of Lucky Strikes. Bernays’s job was to capitalize on the wartime uptick in cigarette sales and try to get the ladies, a hitherto untapped market, smoking. Bernays came up with the campaign “Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Sweet,” and staged a media nonevent; several beautifully dressed young ladies lit cigarettes on Fifth Avenue while promenading on an Easter Sunday afternoon—a real no-no in 1929, even though more women were smoking indoors—to express their glorious freedom from the dictates of the patriarchy. Coffin nails, schmoffin nails; those butts were “torches of freedom.” Cigarette sales surged. Luckies were the number one brand in 1930.
Decades later Bernays’s strategy remains the gold standard when it comes to selling cigarettes to women. The appetite-suppressing charms of the cigarette are demonstrated by the only remaining public female smokers, super-skinny actresses and models who maintain their IKEA-sparse frames with a steady diet of champagne, water, and Marlboros. Cigarette manufacturers still use feministy slogans to shill smokes to the fairer sex, the best example of this being the seemingly interminable “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby” campaign by Virginia Slims. Smoking, in spite of the fact that it is an addiction, continues to be marketed in the argot of freedom and rebellion, nonconformity and escape, popularized by Edward L. Bernays in the 1930s.
Interestingly, while flogging cigarettes, Bernays insisted that his own wife quit smoking. He was worried about her health. Conscience and professionalism finally coincided when, in 1964, Bernays masterminded anti-tobacco campaigns that attempted to inform people of the deleterious effects of smoking.
Bernays worked for more than four hundred clients during his forty years of full-time practice, among them General Motors, NBC, CBS, General Electric, Proctor & Gamble, and Time and Cosmopolitan magazines. Tactics that remain cornerstones of PR, like targeted direct mailing, product placement, and public opinion polling, were pioneered by Bernays. According to Bernays, PR wasn’t just a question of representing corporate interests to the public; he insisted that corporations had to read up on public hopes, desires, and impressions, and use this information to come up with the most powerful rhetoric and effective symbols to sway that public. A good PR man was as much a social scientist as he was an impresario. Bernays, who was Sigmund Freud’s nephew, was particularly interested in the psychology of the crowd. He worked to popularize his uncle’s psychoanalytic theories in the United States and, at the same time, adopted some of the ur-shrink’s ideas in crafting the art and science of spin. In 1932, John Flynn, a writer for The Atlantic Monthly, wrote that Bernays worked to unearth the subconscious desires of the masses, just as his uncle had investigated individual subconscious desires through psychoanalysis.
For Bernays, spin wasn’t just a business but a valuable public service. In books like Propaganda, Crystallizing Public Opinion, and The Engineering of Consent, Bernays argued that PR men helped maintain social order by anticipating the desires of the herd and voicing them to the corporate powers-that-be. PR men were the intelligent, select few, the interpreters who could forge the inchoate masses into a single mind. While Bernays insisted that the thoughtful public relations counselor should turn down suspicious clients—he refused gigs for Franco and Nixon—and stated that the goal of PR was to inform the public, not fool it, his definition of propaganda suggests otherwise. He wrote, “The only difference between ‘propaganda’ and ‘education,’ really, is in the point of view. The advocacy of what we believe in is education. The advocacy of what we don’t believe in is propaganda.” Bernays wasn’t employing propaganda in its popular, pejorative sense. He wrote this passage in the twenties, and propaganda would not become a dirty word until after World War II, when the term became inextricably linked with Fascist movements in Europe. Propaganda was simply what PR men made for a living. Despite Bernays’s oft-repeated injunctions against swindling the public, or telling lies in the service of a client, his definition of propaganda underlines the fact that PR men enthused for a living. The PR man’s job was not to believe but to make beliefs, to document and sway the beliefs of the masses, and to craft believable, sympathetic public profiles for corporate or political entities. It was a far more sweeping endeavor than advertising.
With the growth of broadcast media over the last century, and the increase in available paid space, advertising became the more lucrative and visible of the two professions, though they remain intimately intertwined. Many PR consultants work under the umbrella of ad firms, and PR strategies sometimes involve advertising. Unlike ad firms, PR firms generally fly under the radar. Clinton’s cadre of consultants, among them James Carville, still get screen time, thanks to all the coverage their coverage-making got. But the vast majority of PR simply bleeds into the news. Good PR, like expertly applied makeup, doesn’t look like PR at all.
Let’s take a spin through a PR campaign waged by ConAgra, the second largest food company in North America, which in 2001 was named winner of both PR Week’s 2001 Campaign of the Year and the PRSA’s coveted Silver Anvil Award. (Why the Silver Anvil, you ask? Well, that’s because PR experts forge public opinion, shaping it into useful things like horseshoes or snaffle bits or market shares.) To secure these awards, the nice people at ConAgra, who make brands like Butterball and Healthy Choice, teamed up with a PR firm called Cone to produce a real lollapalooza: “ConAgra’s Feeding Children Better.” The great idea that fueled this program—what Bernays would have called its “Big Think”—was that 12 million kids in the U.S. still went to bed hungry every night, despite the nineties’ boom. ConAgra had thrown some leftover turkeys at the cause before, but these scattershot efforts, noble though they may have been, weren’t sufficient. The PR people at Cone led ConAgra through an intensive research, planning, and program development process they called Cause Maximization™. ConAgra decided to donate to hunger relief efforts, buying trucks for organizations like Second Harvest, and began promoting the now-Maximized Cause™ of child hunger, thus linking its name, and its brands, to the alleviation of said scourge. But before they could begin ladling out free soup for the wee ones, Cone and ConAgra had to make sure that their targeted, strategic approach was proprietary and ownable. Fortunately, it had not occurred to Christ to patent the feeding-the-hungry thing and all was smooth legal sailing. Then, using child hunger as a rallying point for their internal corporate culture, and as a sympathetic spin on their many brands, ConAgra proceeded to rack up more than 85 million media impressions for Feeding Children Better.
ConAgra did donate more than 200 tons of food to the launch of Feeding Children Better, and was consequently named Donor of the Year by Second Harvest. All this is swell and good, but ConAgra, despite their acts of munificence, remains a giant corporation in the business of business, doing good for the express purpose of those 85 million media impressions. This maneuver, a philanthropic gesture to bolster the company’s good name and lend an aura of social responsibility to the concern that sells you your transfats and your high-fructose corn syrup, is classic PR. Whenever you hear anything about a company doing something nice from the goodness of its heart, you are seeing the fruits of weeks of meetings to determine how best the company can make nice. ConAgra’s charitable works
were, in PR parlance, a natural fit. Hungry kids + kind megafood corp = publicity gold.
Cause Maximization™ wouldn’t have impressed Immanuel Kant much; a moral action is not properly moral if the actor is showing off in the interest of being seen as moral.
Funny thing: At the same time that this glorious initiative against Child Hunger was being launched, the Centers for Disease Control released some pretty compelling statistics about child obesity. Fourteen percent of American children were morbidly obese, with all the attendant health hazards the condition implies. There were more big fat kids than there were little hungry ones, but child obesity would hardly have been a natural fit for ConAgra. After all, ConAgra made Orville Redenbacher popcorn and distributed the vast majority of french fries available at fast-food outlets; how would a “Feeding Children Less” campaign have played, given that most obese kids were wearing a couple of pounds of ConAgra fries?
Of course, PR is not all free hot lunch for the urchins. PR is also responsible for engineering nonevents like the Millennium Dreamers Campaign, which brought together McDonald’s, Walt Disney, and UNESCO. This league of giants united to, um, recognize children. Seriously. Outstanding kids from all over the world were nominated to be part of a delegation of two thousand. Phase two saw the names of the two thousand children revealed at a special event at the United Nations New York headquarters. This was notable, claimed the campaign summary, since the event marked the first joint public appearance of corporate icons Ronald McDonald and Mickey Mouse. The final phase of the Millennium Dreaming was a youth summit at Walt Disney World Resort in Florida, where the children received medals for outstanding contributions to their communities and took part in a symposium on leadership in the glorious future.
What kind of outstanding contributions did these youngsters make? Millennium Dreamers are those nice kids you always see in the newspaper, raising funds for the sick and the poor, campaigning against violence and war, working for worthy causes. It’s nice of the Rat and the Clown to spring for a party in honor of these most excellent moppets, but it doesn’t really change the fact that they are pimping out the sweetest kids in the world to maintain their iron grip on the fantasy lives and temper tantrums of kids all over the globe. And despite more than 2 billion media impressions, damned if I can remember even one of those talented kids. I do remember Mickey and Ronald, though, and, as the summary notes, “The objectives behind the program included increasing awareness of McDonald’s and Disney on the part of kids and families around the world; enhancing the value of the McDonald’s/Disney partnership both internally and externally; and capturing media attention.”
Think, for a minute, of your good friend, your brain. Picture it as real estate. Who’s installed in the waterfront property, synaptically speaking? I’d wager that if you sat down and tried to write a list of three McDonald’s slogans or commercials from memory, it would not take you very long. Previous generations could recite poems and epics from memory; in my twilight years, when I am senile and misrecognizing my own family members, I will doubtless still be able to recall “You Deserve a Break Today.” Now try to remember three UN slogans or campaigns. Do they arrive with the same brisk dispatch? If so, you are a better citizen than I am, and I salute you.
Ad creep continues apace, into every nook and cranny of public life. There are ads on washroom doors, billboards ferried by tractor-trailers, and cars wrapped in signage. There are ads on park benches, ads that encase entire buses, and product placement endorsements in the content between the ads. Moreover, ads, like eighties’ pop songs and celebrity gossip and comedic catchphrases, are quicker and stickier and flashier than anything else we see. What chance does slow, plodding knowledge have against “Wasssup?” or “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing?” or “Zoom Zoom Zoom”? Like armies of mnemonic ninjas, they drop out of nowhere and into your head before you even know what hit you.
Some ads, by virtue of the products they shill, remain tethered to quotidian reality. It’s hard to jazz up an adult diaper; all one can really do is find a nice-looking white-haired lady, have her deliver a few euphemistic phrases about freedom and control, and cut to some shots of spry, vibrant seniors. It is when the product is completely beyond the bounds of need that advertising truly excels, soaring to heights of Wagnerian spectacle. Check out the Cola War; nobody needs Pepsi or Coke, but everyone wants ’em, even though, as comic strip Bloom County once had it, “both taste like malted battery acid.” The 2001 Oscar night Pepsi ad, a Britney Spears production, features people watching a Britney Spears Pepsi ad. A cook stands slack-jawed, gawking, while his burgers burn. A soccer mom sings along—girl power! Bob Dole, a former spokesperson for Viagra, leers at the little nymphet and says, “Easy, boy” to his randy dog, while she shakes her sequined moneymaker and chirps about the Joy of Cola. The music, the dancing, the lighting, the huge celebratory hullabaloo over absolutely nothing; pure Cola, millions of dollars visibly and gleefully spent to produce a sixty-second ditty about cheap brown sugar water. Pepsi’s not just willing to burn money; they set Michael Jackson on fire to get our attention.
In the interest of being fairish, I give ads points for being blatant. This thunk-you-on-the-head obviousness isn’t a virtue, but it seems like a lesser evil when compared to PR, which bears a great responsibility for reducing the past decade’s political discourse to a pageant of fraudulence and play-acting. If a politician receives the press without a spokesman or handler of some sort, it is only because his handlers have told him it would look better to greet the public sans entourage—so it’s time for an equally phony round of pancake-flipping and har-dee-har-har with the good people on Main St. Is it any wonder that almost half the people in North America can’t be arsed to vote? Even Bernays, back in the day, warned that public opinion polling could be dangerously addictive for political machines, resulting in a situation where our leaders no longer lead decisively but merely follow the whims and fancies of the people as expressed in the polls.
Moreover, PR firms have gone beyond the old bag of tricks as their industry has expanded. Hiring “independent” experts, or forming seemingly public-minded committees to shill and front for industry has been part of the way PR works since Bernays got into the business. If a paid spokesperson says it, it’s advertising. If experts or committees who have been paid surreptitiously say it, it’s PR. There are as many industry front committees are there are industries. A few examples include the Alliance for Better Foods, a consortium of farming, biotech, and grocery concerns, which advocates for more delicious genetic modification. The American Council on Science and Health, a consortium of scientists paid for by chemical and pharmaceutical manufacturers, soothes worries about pills and pesticides. The National Wilderness Institute, a conservative pro-forestry think tank, bills itself as a “voice of reason on the environment.” This is a trope common to all such groups, be they pro-drug, pro-pollution, pro-biotech, or anti-regulation. Critics of corporations are accused of presenting junk science, hysterical scares, and trivial concerns. Front groups respond with sound science, solid research, and the assurance that all is well.
Medialink, one of the world’s most successful PR agencies, has improved on the press release from the front committee with a little number called the VNR, or video news release. These are pretaped segments that wrap a product in a problem or a cause or the bombast of ostensible breakthrough. They are distributed to news outlets all over the country, and sneak their way into your evening news. As Medialink’s website brags, “Every major television station in the world now uses VNRs regularly, and most are from Medialink. It’s a fact.” Ironic they should use the f-word, considering that VNRs aren’t even infotainment, let alone hard facts. They are infoadvertainment with the gall to pretend to be news.
There are also firms that specialize in fabricating grassroots activists to maximize a cause that is actually a corporate interest. What could be more credible than the spontaneous support of concerned citizens? PR firms such as Burson-Marste
ller, Davies Communications, and the Bivings Group produce a reasonable focus-grouped facsimile of just that. Such groups include the Coalition for Health Insurance Choices, who helped undermine Clinton’s health care proposals on behalf of the Health Insurers’ Association of America. Microsoft had a grassroots strategy to diffuse the bad press around their antitrust trial, which was preempted when someone leaked it to The Los Angeles Times. More recently, the exact same letter to the editor appeared, supporting the president, in newspapers across America. Clever bloggers tracked the form letter to a Republican website, which allowed to you to click and send copies of the missive to the publications of your choice. Hell, even the White House engages in this sort of thing. Recently, the Office of Drug Control Policy got their knuckles rapped for distributing a VNR of their own on the perils of pot, and conservative pundit Armstrong Williams revealed that he was paid $240,000 to shill No Child Left Behind.
Other front groups, such as Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse, Citizens for a Sound Economy, and the Center for Consumer Freedom, who work for tort reform and deregulation on behalf of big business, capture, in their very names, this attempt to purchase the veneer of public support. Groups like Citizens for Sensible Energy Choices, and the Greening Earth Society, though they may sound like a bowl of crunchy granola, are funded by the energy industry and organized by PR firms. Truly, they are doing the good work, passing the conch to the just plain folks. How simply swell to know that even the soccer moms, grandmas, children, and concerned citizens who fulminate at municipal council meetings have been tricked out with a set of talking points and the strategic, paid-for message of PR.
By the way, this little trick is called astroturfing. And that’s the quickest way to get an absolutely perfect, changeless lawn, to ensure that all is wonderfully green. Dispense with the grass altogether.