Your Call Is Important To Us (5 page)

When you pay the piper, you call the tune—which means that ads also determine the content we consume. Thus, Bill Hicks never got to do his last set on
Late Night with David Letterman,
although he had previously appeared on the show eleven times. He performed his monologue for Dave and the audience before the taping began. But at the last minute, his performance was unceremoniously dumped. Hicks had a bit about pro-lifers, and one of the show’s sponsors was a pro-life organization. Hicks was so incensed that he wrote a letter about the perils of truth-telling in the “United States of Advertising” to
The New Yorker
writer John Lahr. “Look at 90 percent of what’s on TV,” Hicks wrote. “Banal, puerile, trite scat.” Letterman, a big fan, was contrite about the way the producers handled the situation, but Hicks died of pancreatic cancer, at the age of thirty-two, before the show could book him again.

Sponsors are not often so flagrantly censorious, as ads usually influence content further upstream. Networks generally feel compelled to pitch all programs to the lowest common denominator, or to the most desirable demographic, the eighteen-to-thirty-four set, so as to satisfy advertisers. To see the way that network advertiser dollars produce programming pabulum, watch an episode of
Six Feet Under
or
The Sopranos,
made by the commercial-free HBO and compare it to your standard-issue schlubby-guy-married-to-a-beautiful-lady sitcom, or one of the countless cop dramas that are copies of copies of
Law and Order,
or any of the cheap and venal reality shows.

In the same way that most of us consider ourselves excellent bullshit detectors, we generally think ourselves immune to ads. Some shrewd marketing pros have caught on to this resistance, or resentment, and insist that PR is the new brand-building force. Ads are obvious and ubiquitous, but PR cloaks itself in credibility. PR is the stealth form of advertising—a far more subtle art. Its stock in trade is the semi-science and pseudo-research that so often end up in the news. One nice example of this sort of press-release-friendly research is the Credibility Index, produced by a consortium of top PR firms. This is a ranking of occupations according to trustworthiness. Supreme Court justices, teachers, ordinary citizens, and military officials get high trust ratings, according to the survey. Public relations specialists, like the nice people who conducted the research, rank third from the bottom, just ahead of Hollywood phonies like entertainers and talk-show hosts, and well behind other alleged fibbers, like politicians and CEOs.

PR specialists are nothing if not diligent in their attempts to work their way up the Index. This may explain why they bandy about the word
ethics
so freely. On one of the countless websites that do PR for PR, a slogan reads, “Ethical PR: Not an Oxymoron!” When you have to say that sort of thing with an exclamation mark, perhaps your image-making business has an image problem. Both the American and Canadian public relations guilds stress the importance of ethics for the public relations practitioner. The first line of the Public Relations Society of America Members’ Code of Ethics Pledge reads, “I pledge to conduct myself professionally, with truth, accuracy, fairness, and responsibility to the public.” The predominant model of conduct in most current PR-school literature is journalism. PR counselors, like reporters, must disseminate factually accurate information in a clear and compelling manner. The big difference is that journalists don’t engineer the events that they report on. Sure, journalists and their editors choose to cover the corrupt company or the dog show, but they generally don’t fabricate stories from whole cloth, Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass notwithstanding. PR is unabashedly a full-service operation: They produce the event and report on it.

It takes PR to turn the mere fact of a new product or a new policy into a bona fide event. And it takes PR to hand the first drafts of reportage to the media. PR is like having your very own personal reporter, writing
The You Times,
where the news, even if it’s bad, even if it’s not news at all, still makes you look good. And if you’re a big PR firm like Burson-Marsteller, then you are writing
The You Times
for folks like Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, those responsible for the Bhopal disaster, the Saudi royal family, the people who produce bovine growth hormones, and Exxon after the
Valdez
spill.

There have, of course, been spokespeople and promoters since the dawn of time. The word
propaganda
comes from the efforts of the Catholic Church, under Pope Gregory XV, to propagate the faith in the wake of the Reformation. Publicity materials and handbills were used by manufacturers of soap and patent medicines in North America throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But public relations and advertising as established, lucrative professions grew huge over the last century, expanding alongside media technologies like radio, television, and the Internet. Advertising got a head start: The first ad agency in the United States opened in Philadelphia in 1841. By the 1890s, J. Walter Thompson, the oldest North American ad agency still operating, was billing a million dollars a year. By the turn of the century, Coca-Cola’s advertising budget was up to 100,000 dollars a year, and newcomer Pepsi hit the market in 1902, starting the glorious century-long advertising bonanza that is the Cola War.

The Publicity Bureau, the first PR firm in North America, also opened at the turn of the century, in 1901. The Boston office practiced a sort of proto-PR, helping clients look good in the muckraking dailies of the time. It’s difficult to determine the parentage of an entire profession, and this goes double for a field like public relations, since a couple of early PR men laid claim to the title “Father of PR” when doing their own PR. The two most serious contenders, though, in terms of sheer influence and longevity, are “Poison” Ivy Lee and Edward L. Bernays.

Lee was a reporter who got into the nascent publicity biz in 1903. He counted Bethlehem Steel, the Pennsylvania Railroad, and American Tobacco among his clients. He also implemented the Rockefeller family makeover in 1914; after thirteen women and children were killed in a labor protest at a Rockefeller mine in Ludlow, Missouri, and the robber barons took a beating in the press and public opinion, Ivy did damage control and rehabilitated their public image. After first spinning the massacre into a blow for “industrial freedom,” Lee’s strategy was simple: Actions speak louder than words. The Rockefellers’ subsequent actions—oodles of cash for philanthropic initiatives, the pursuit of political office—have made the Ludlow mine disaster the obscurest of labor history footnotes, and the name Rockefeller synonymous with dynastic East Coast wealth. The rich guy on
The Flintstones
was a Rockefeller; Jay-Z, one of the most successful East Coast rappers, probably didn’t dub his posse the Roc-A-Fella crew to invoke strike-breaking incidents of yore.

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.