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PR is a better business than advertising!

reckoned Daniel Edelman | Jan, 19th, 2013 | The Economist

For every reporter employed in America, around six people work in public relations: a few too many, some might think.

But it was not like that when Daniel Edelman launched his PR firm in Chicago in 1952, a time when the job mostly involved writing speeches for the chief executive, putting out press releases and taking journalists to lunch.

Mr. Edelman, who died on January 15th, aged 92, was a pioneer, introducing innovations that reflected his bigger vision of PR as a more effective way to market a company’s reputation and brands than its fancier (and costlier) big brother, advertising. His role in creating the modern PR business, which spans everything from crisis management to political lobbying, is described in a new book, “Edelman and the Rise of Public Relations”, by Franz Wisner.

Mr. Edelman cut his teeth with a publicity stunt promoting the then revolutionary “Toni home-perm kits”. He secured front-page puffs by hiring sets of twins, one sporting a Toni perm, the other not. They travelled around posing for photos kissing local big shots, and asking: “Which Twin has the Toni?” Later, as well as championing celebrity product endorsements, Mr. Edelman helped develop the Morris the Cat character to promote “9Lives” cat food, and a popular customer helpline for “Butterball Turkeys”.

After winning the account of Sara Lee, a food giant, the Edelman Company went on to create image-making campaigns for causes as varied as bowling, the Concorde supersonic plane, Starbucks, the Mormon church, and indeed The Economist.

More controversially, Edelman advised the tobacco industry in the 1980s as it grappled with growing public unease over the poisonous effects of passive smoking.

Mr. Edelman was a rewarding but demanding boss, with a competitive drive that helped him win important pitches for business, not least when going head-to-head against his firm’s archrivals in New York, Burson-Marsteller and Hill & Knowlton. He had a particular knack, uncommon among his peers, for thinking things through before offering his solution.
He never really retired, remaining chairman until the end.

At his death, the firm employed more than 4.500 people worldwide. It generated revenues in 2011 of US$ 615 million. It is still family-owned, and run by his son Richard. (Mr. Edelman turned down many offers to buy it over the years.)

He had always considered PR a superior, more honest and nuanced business than advertising, and feared that acquisition by an advertising-dominated group such as WPP or Publicis would crush its spirit — the fate, as he saw it, of its old rivals when they were bought by Madison Avenue’s Mad Men.

Nowadays, although public relations is hardly without its critics, Mr. Edelman’s view of the merits of PR relative to advertising is much more widely shared, though never as enthusiastically as four decades ago, when Charlie Lubin, the founder of Sara Lee, said that thanks to Mr. Edelman, his PR budget was worth 1.000 times more than his advertising budget. Those were the days.