Edward Bernays Inventing Public Relations

Yes, someone intvented PR!

931 Ad Lucky Strike Cigarettes American Tobacco Broadway Actress Leone Sousa

A Lucky Strike advert from the 1930s showing the supposed health benefits of smoking. Source: tobacco.stanford.edu, available here.

Edward Bernays’ Green Campaign for Lucky Strike.
The women who smoked In the 1930s didn’t like the green color of the Lucky Strike packages. Edward Bernays set up a major campaign “to convince women that green was the new black.” With assistance from editors at Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, green began to dominate the fashion world. He came up with the “Green Ball” held in 1934 in New York, featuring some of the city’s most prominent socialites.” (read more neatorama.com)

Edward Bernays for Lucky Strike.
In the late 1920s, American Tobacco Company chairman George Washington Hill wanted to gain the female market for his Lucky Strike cigarettes; so he hired Edward Bernays. Bernays PR company came up in the with the idea to market cigarettes as ‘Torches of Freedom’ Bare in mind that in the 19th century smoking for women in public was not done at all.
During the New York Easter Parade in 1929, “a young woman named Bertha Hunt stepped out into the crowded fifth avenue and created a scandal by lightning a Lucky Strike cigarette. The incident was highlighted even more because the press had been informed in advance of Hunt’s course of actions, and had been provided with appropriate leaflets and pamphlets. What they did not know was that Hunt was Bernays’s secretary and that this was the first in a long line of events that was aimed at getting women to puff. Bernays proclaimed that smoking was a form of liberation for women, their chance to express their new found strength and freedom.” (read more yourstory.com) That worked well! Lucky Strike sold “40 billion cigarettes in 1930 compared to 14 billion just five years earlier” (read more) historyisnowmagazine.com

It’s things-from-the-past-you-should-see-week, an educational program at Mimi Berlin.

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