Pleasant memoir of early days of PR doesn’t live up to the spin of its title
Journalists regard public relations as a dark and unnecessary art, despite the fact that the majority of stories in any major media outlet are there because of a press release, statement or other PR approach, and not because of journalists fearlessly probing and digging, unprompted.
Journalists see PR operators as devoted to spin and schmooz, although journalists do not believe that they themselves have ever been deceived by spin or schmooz. It’s the other hacks who get seduced, misled, and spun.
This view of PR as a stinky aspect of the communications continuum is part of the moral self-definition of many journalists — up to the point where they get seduced by a higher-paid job in PR. If they take the job, they still think of themselves as journalists, long after they’ve parted company with that trade, and long after their former colleagues have taken to using carbolic soap after every handshake with them. Journalists see PR as a distasteful given of modern life, serving the media’s insatiable hunger for data and doing so for viciously commercial purposes.
One of the first to see commercial potential in feeding that hunger was showman PT Barnum, who, in the early decades of the 19th century, announced that joining his travelling exhibition would be “the most astonishing and interesting curiosity in the world.” This curiosity was a woman of African-American origins who, said Barnum, had been George Washington’s nurse when he was a baby, which would have been a stretch, because, he claimed, Joyce Heth was 161 years old. Despite her age, Joyce was a good talker, with first-hand accounts of Washington’s behaviour as a youngster.
But, just as the late Princess Diana’s butler has had to keep re-inventing himself to maintain his income after his iteration began to pall, even a superannuated nanny to the famous runs out of steam and some new angle must be dreamed up to grab media attention anew. This is what Barnum did for Joyce Heth, when her appeal began to fade, by the simple dint of sending an anonymous letter to a Boston newspaper suggesting that the old woman was a fraud. Since that was obvious, he suggested, through the planted letter, that Heth wasn’t even human. Instead, said the letter, she was “a curiously constructed automaton, made up of whalebone, India-rubber, and numberless springs, ingeniously put together and made to move at the slightest touch, according to the will of the operator.”
This was a stroke of genius. Suddenly, audiences who had tired of a woman a century and a half old wanted to pay all over again to check her back to see if she was, in fact, moved by wires.
Robert Leaf ignores the Joyce Heth section of PT Barnum’s life, but is nonetheless enamoured of the old fraud, largely because, when Leaf started his career, publicity was usually purchased. It was all about the advertising spend. Leaf was one of a new generation of PR men (and, later, women) who could get their clients publicity without paying for it. In the early days of America’s Burson-Marsteller agency, he and others circumvented the need to advertise by writing features and news reports about their clients, or their clients’ products, in clear, appealing English, before placing them for free in newspapers; the only media that mattered at the time.
“Writing was a major part of the job back then,” he says, “whereas, today, writing a release or feature is usually a very small part of the PR executive’s total activities. A number of editors have told me, and even shown me, examples of material they have received in the mail from PR firms and in-house departments that were so bad it was embarrassing.”
Dropping standards of literacy are not the only difference Leaf notes between PR when he started and PR now. The top guys, 50 years ago, were massive personalities with matching egos, whereas, now, the emphasis is on the capacity to work in teams. (And also, in Europe, the emphasis is on staying within bullying and harassment laws.) Madison Avenue, as presented in the TV show Mad Men, was characterised by massive male intake of alcohol, cigarettes and sex. PR, as described by Leaf, followed much the same pattern. He writes about one account executive who had three Martinis every day at lunch. It was, he says, “helpful in building a close relationship with the client, which was important for business.” No doubt it was, although one might be pardoned for speculating about the account executive’s productivity for the rest of the afternoon after the long liquid lunch.
Oddly, Leaf partly attributes the abandonment of the three-Martini lunch to the fact that today’s client-agency relationships are not as personal and close as they were back then. That may have a germ of truth in it. When massive corporate and state entities buy the services of massive public relations companies — mastodons of bureaucracy meeting through elaborate tendering processes — there is less friendship with clients, although the PR firm would still claim to work best “in partnership” with the client.
That’s the problem with this book. It’s written truthfully, by a pleasant and successful man who was present at many of the big development points in the profession, yet it is neither corporate history nor account of sectoral development.
It delivers no startling new psychological insights, as implicit in its misleading title. It’s an autobiography of a figure who may have been of key importance in the development of an international PR brand, but who is not, and never has been, a household name in the wider world. An enjoyable primer on the history of public relations, but no more than that.
