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The following is a list of public relations, propaganda, and marketing campaigns orchestrated by Edward Bernays (22 November 1891 – 9 March 1995).
Bernays is regarded as the pioneer of public relations. His influence radically changed the persuasion tactics used in campaign advertising and political campaigns.
Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud. His early adoption of Freud's psychoanalytic theory was instrumental in defining the goals and strategies of public relations. Freud theorized that people are motivated by unconscious desires. To develop public relations, Bernays synthesized elements of Freud's work with Gustave Le Bon's researches into crowd psychology, and Wilfred Trotter's theories of herd instinct.
In the 1920s, it was considered taboo for women to smoke in public. George W. Hill, president of the American Tobacco Company, realized that his company was missing a share of the market. He hired Bernays to change the taboo and persuade women to start smoking. Bernays contacted psychoanalyst Abraham Brill to understand the societal perceptions that discouraged women from smoking. Brill told him that for feminists, cigarettes were like "torches of freedom" that symbolized their nonconformity and freedom from male oppression.
Bernays used this information to build a strategy. He contacted a female friend and asked her to find a group of women to march in the New York City Easter Day parade. He asked her to tell the press that a group of women's rights marchers would light "Torches of Freedom". The women lit Lucky Strike cigarettes in front of the eager photographers. The New York Times (1 April 1929) printed: "Group of Girls Puff at Cigarettes as a Gesture of 'Freedom'". [1]
In the 1930s, he attempted to convince women that Lucky Strike cigarettes' forest green pack was the most fashionable color. Letters were written to interior and fashion designers, department stores, and prominent women of society pushing green as the new hot color for the season. Balls, gallery exhibitions, and window displays all featured green after Bernays got through with them. The result was that green did indeed become a very popular color for the 1934 season and Lucky Strike kept their pack color and female clientele intact.
After his semi-retirement in the 1960s, he worked with the pro-health anti-smoking lawyer John Banzhaf's group, ASH and supported other anti-smoking campaigns.
Bernays helped to convince the American public that water fluoridation was safe and beneficial to human health. [2]
Bernays applied Freud's observations to convince the public, among other things, that bacon and eggs was the true all-American breakfast. [3]
Bernays once engineered a "pancake breakfast" with vaudevillians for Calvin Coolidge in what is widely considered one of the first overt publicity stunts for a US president.
Bernays's most extreme political propaganda activities were said to be conducted on behalf of the multinational corporation United Fruit Company (renamed Chiquita Brands International in 1984) and the U.S. government to facilitate the successful 1954 coup against the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. Bernays's propaganda (documented in the BBC documentary The Century of the Self ), branding Arbenz as communist, was published in major U.S. media. According to a book review by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton of Larry Tye's biography of Bernays, The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays & The Birth of PR, "the term 'banana republic' actually originated in reference to United Fruit's domination of corrupt governments in Guatemala and other Central American countries." [4]
When Venida, a hairnet manufacturer, hired Bernays' services, he started a campaign to convince women to grow their hair longer so they would buy more hairnets. Although the campaign failed to influence many women, it convinced government officials to require hairnets for certain jobs.
Bernays worked with Procter & Gamble for Ivory-brand bar soap. The campaign successfully convinced people that Ivory soap was medically superior to other soaps. He also promoted soap through sculpting contests and floating contests because the soap floated better than its competitors'.
In the 1930s, his Dixie Cup campaign was designed to convince consumers that only disposable cups were sanitary by linking the imagery of the overflowing cup with subliminal images of vaginas and venereal disease. [5]
In 1920, Bernays successfully hosted the first NAACP convention in Atlanta, Georgia. His campaign was considered successful because there was no violence at the convention. His campaign focused on the important contributions of African-Americans to Whites living in the South. He later received an award from the NAACP for his contribution.
In October 1929, Bernays was involved in promoting Light's Golden Jubilee. The event, which spanned across several major cities in the U.S., was designed to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Thomas Edison's invention of the light-bulb (though a form of light-bulb had been simultaneously invented by Joseph Swan). The publicity elements of the Jubilee–including the special issuance of a U.S. postage stamp and Edison's "re-creating" the invention of the light bulb for a nationwide radio audience – provided evidence of Bernays's love for big ideas and "ballyhoo". A follow-up event for the 75th anniversary, produced for television by David O. Selznick, was titled Light's Diamond Jubilee and broadcast on all four American TV networks on October 24, 1954.
Bernays was the publicity director of the 1939 New York World's Fair.
In 1913, Bernays secured one of his first consulting contracts. American actor Richard Bennett hired him to defend a play that promoted sex education against police interference. Bernays set up a front organization called the Medical Review of Reviews Sociological Fund. Although the organization purported to fight sexually transmitted disease, its sole purpose was to endorse Bennett's play. [6]
In 1915, to prepare for the Ballets Russes' US tour, Sergei Diaghilev hired Bernays to convince American magazines to publish articles telling readers that ballet is fun to watch.
John Stauber is an American progressive writer. Stauber has co-authored five books about government propaganda, private interests and the public relations industry. His work includes one book about how industry manipulates science, one about the history and current scope of the public relations industry, and one about mad cow disease, which predicted the surfacing of the disease within the United States.
Propaganda is communication that is primarily used to influence or persuade an audience to further an agenda, which may not be objective and may be selectively presenting facts to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information that is being presented. Propaganda can be found in a wide variety of different contexts.
Public relations (PR) is the practice of managing and disseminating information from an individual or an organization to the public in order to influence their perception. Public relations and publicity differ in that PR is controlled internally, whereas publicity is not controlled and contributed by external parties. Public relations may include an organization or individual gaining exposure to their audiences using topics of public interest and news items that do not require direct payment. The exposure mostly is media-based. This differentiates it from advertising as a form of marketing communications. Public relations aims to create or obtain coverage for clients for free, also known as earned media, rather than paying for marketing or advertising also known as paid media. But in the early 21st century, advertising is also a part of broader PR activities.
Sheldon Rampton is an American editor and author. He was editor of PR Watch, and is the author of several books that criticize the public relations industry and what he sees as other forms of corporate and government propaganda.
In public relations and politics, spin is a form of propaganda, achieved through knowingly providing a biased interpretation of an event or campaigning to influence public opinion about some organization or public figure. While traditional public relations and advertising may manage their presentation of facts, "spin" often implies the use of disingenuous, deceptive, and manipulative tactics.
Edward Louis Bernays was an American theorist, considered a pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda, and referred to in his obituary as "the father of public relations". His best-known campaigns include a 1929 effort to promote female smoking by branding cigarettes as feminist "Torches of Freedom", and his work for the United Fruit Company in the 1950s, connected with the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan government in 1954. He worked for dozens of major American corporations including Procter & Gamble and General Electric, and for government agencies, politicians, and nonprofit organizations.
Lucky Strike is an American brand of cigarettes owned by the British American Tobacco group. Individual cigarettes of the brand are often referred to colloquially as "Luckies."
George Edward Creel was an American investigative journalist and writer, a politician and government official. He served as the head of the United States Committee on Public Information, a propaganda organization created by President Woodrow Wilson during World War I.
Propaganda, an influential book written by Edward L. Bernays in 1928, incorporated the literature from social science and psychological manipulation into an examination of the techniques of public communication. Bernays wrote the book in response to the success of some of his earlier works such as Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) and A Public Relations Counsel (1927). Propaganda explored the psychology behind manipulating masses and the ability to use symbolic action and propaganda to influence politics, effect social change, and lobby for gender and racial equality. Walter Lippman was Bernays' unacknowledged American mentor and his work The Phantom Public greatly influenced the ideas expressed in Propaganda a year later. The work propelled Bernays into media historians' view of him as the "father of public relations."
A hairnet, or sometimes simply a net or caul, is a small, often elasticised, fine net worn over long hair to hold it in place. It is worn to keep hair contained. A snood is similar, but a looser fit, and with a much coarser mesh and noticeably thicker yarn.
Abraham Arden Brill was an Austrian-born psychiatrist who spent almost his entire adult life in the United States. He was the first psychoanalyst to practice in the United States and the first translator of Sigmund Freud into English.
"The Engineering of Consent" is an essay by Edward Bernays first published in 1947, and a book he published in 1955.
Most textbooks date the establishment of the "Publicity Bureau" in 1900 as the start of the modern public relations (PR) profession. Of course, there were many early forms of public influence and communications management in history. Basil Clarke is considered the founder of the public relations profession in Britain with his establishment of Editorial Services in 1924. Academic Noel Turnball points out that systematic PR was employed in Britain first by religious evangelicals and Victorian reformers, especially opponents of slavery. In each case the early promoters focused on their particular movement and were not for hire more generally.
In the early 20th century, German researchers found additional evidence linking smoking to health harms, which strengthened the anti-tobacco movement in the Weimar Republic and led to a state-supported anti-smoking campaign. Early anti-tobacco movements grew in many nations from the middle of the 20th century. The 1933–1945 anti-tobacco campaigns in Nazi Germany have been widely publicized, although stronger laws than those passed in Germany were passed in some American states, the UK, and elsewhere between 1890 and 1930. After 1941, anti-tobacco campaigns were restricted by the Nazi government.
George Washington Hill became President of American Tobacco Co. after his father Percival Hill. He hired public relations expert Edward Bernays to reverse the taboo against women smoking in public, which he did successfully by his advertisement campaigns.
Tobacco smoking has serious negative effects on the body. A wide variety of diseases and medical phenomena affect the sexes differently, and the same holds true for the effects of tobacco. Since the proliferation of tobacco, many cultures have viewed smoking as a masculine vice, and as such the majority of research into the specific differences between men and women with regards to the effects of tobacco have only been studied in-depth in recent years.
Cigarette smoking for weight loss is a weight control method whereby one consumes tobacco, often in the form of cigarettes, to decrease one's appetite. The practice dates to early knowledge of nicotine as an appetite suppressant.
"Torches of Freedom" was a phrase used to encourage women's smoking by exploiting women's aspirations for a better life during the early twentieth century first-wave feminism in the United States. Cigarettes were described as symbols of emancipation and equality with men. The term was first used by psychoanalyst A. A. Brill when describing the natural desire for women to smoke and was used by Edward Bernays to encourage women to smoke in public despite social taboos. Bernays hired women to march while smoking their "torches of freedom" in the Easter Sunday Parade of 31 March 1929, which was a significant moment for fighting social barriers for women smokers.
Doris Elsa Fleischman Bernays, was an American writer, public relations executive, and feminist activist. Fleischman was a member of the Lucy Stone League, a group which encouraged women to keep their names after marriage. She was the first married woman to be issued a United States passport in her maiden name, Doris Fleischman, in 1925.
The history of nicotine marketing stretches back centuries. Nicotine marketing has continually developed new techniques in response to historical circumstances, societal and technological change, and regulation. Countermarketing has also changed, in both message and commonness, over the decades, often in response to pro-nicotine marketing.