The Birth of PR & Edward L. Bernays

Today, most people know something about PR and what's it all about. Still few people outside the Public Relations profession recognize the name of Edward Louis Bernays. However, his name deserves to figure on historians' lists of the most influential figures of the 20th century!

He was the father of Spin, father of Public Relations. I'm not gonna tell his whole life story, but at least some achievements he made.

He was born 1891 in Vienna and moved to New York with his family when he was one year old. He was a nephew of Sigmund Freud!

Bernays graduated from Cornell University in 1912 and took up editing and promoting two medical journals. Then he opened the first recognized Public relations firm. He began practising PR during WWI. At the New York University, he taught the first college course in Public Relations. He pioneered a new way of addressing basic people needs via advertising and public relations using his uncle´s ideas. He was really a great out-of-the-box thinker.

Did you guys know, that women` smoking was not accepted until Edward Bernays? During the 1920's, mostly men were smoking and women were not.

In 1928, the American tobacco company asked Bernays to help expand sales of cigarettes to women. Rather than promote the qualities of the brand, Bernays sought to alter the image of smoking in women’s minds. The goal that Bernays was supposed to work on during this campaign was to get women to smoke.  He staged his own “Torches of Freedom” campaign. 

The cigarettes which were usually equated with men, represented torches of freedom for women. The event caused a national stir and stories appeared in newspapers throughout the country. Bernays's efforts had a lasting effect on women smoking.

His PR Techniques...(Wikipedia says:)

One of Bernays' favorite techniques for manipulating public opinion was the indirect use of "third party authorities" to plead his clients' causes. "If you can influence the leaders, either with or without their conscious cooperation, you automatically influence the group which they sway", he said. In order to promote sales of bacon, for example, he conducted a survey of physicians and reported their recommendation that people eat heavy breakfasts. He sent the results of the survey to 5,000 physicians, along with publicity touting bacon and eggs as a heavy breakfast. 

The beginning is always the hardest part

Okey so now I'm gonna take my first steps....I totally surprised myself when I decided to choose this topic, but here we go....

In this course we have a lot to learn from PR developments and processes in history. As strange as it may sound I thought it would be quite beneficial also to learn more about the people who have created important significations and convulsions in the history of PR. I would like to know more about who did what and how practices and PR slowly became rituals in our history. And if I'm going to be a PR Professional in the future, I should know even something about the REAL PR Professionals and Gurus in the whole wide world...Will you agree? (I bet you will fall asleep now..ha ha ha)

This blog is an attempt to get to learn more about the Public Relations Experts and I'll try not to make this too boring for you. 

In my next post I will introduce the father of Public Relations, Edward Louis Bernays...so be prepared!:)

-Sini-