Public Relations

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Public Relations

Varying in scope and duration, and differing in the methods used, all of the following examples have one thing in common—they were managed by practitioners of public relations and they would be recognized by any professional as public relations in practice:

• Fifty years after Thomas A. Edison invented the electric lightbulb, Edward L. Bernays convinces industrial leaders to finance and support "Light's Golden Jubilee," a year-long nationwide celebration involving school children writing essays, inventors contributing their machines to an industrial museum, and an event in Dearborn, Michigan, attended by Edison, Henry Ford, President Herbert Hoover, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and a host of American inventors and presidents of corporations—a major "photo-op" if ever there was one.
• A coalition of environmental groups, concerned about pollution of drinking water, pushes a state legislature to call a public referendum on a bond issue to mandate stronger control of pollutants. A grassroots campaign—costing little but involving hundreds of volunteers and a speaker's bureau— succeeds in passing the law and funding cleanups.
• On the day of the initial public offering of its stock, the president of a software company rings the opening bell on the New York Stock Exchange while his employees toss T-shirts and baseball caps to those on the trading floor—an event that is seen by hundreds of thousands on the cable business channel CNBC.
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