After a particularly difficult weekend helping out a poor innocent who was the subject of some unpleasant attention from a Sunday newspaper, a note arrived in my inbox from a pal who had heard about the dilemma. “Take a look at this to see how the weasel words and lies of a news desk are treated…
In 1933 on June 1st it was a bad day for Jack Morgan Jnr, head of the Morgan Financial Group, who had been summoned before a Senate Banking Committee. Visibly distressed under such public scrutiny while being badgered by the Banking committee’s chief counsel, Ferdinand Pecora, the proceedings became something a public carnival. But it…
Roland Butler, the famous circus publicist came up with a great idea to publicise the listings for local circuses. Most newspapers in Chicago would not print circus listings which was obviously very costly to the circus owners. Butler created a fictitious eleven year old from Chicago who couldn’t write from left to right so wrote…
Jim Moran strikes again; this time for a well established piano manufacturer in the U.S. He publicised the fact that Professor James Burt from Jamestown had broken the world record for continuous piano playing. The Professor sat in the window of a famous New York department store for days and nights without food or drink…
Jim Moran created a great stunt for a bed company in Alabama in 1959 for their 40th anniversary. He came up with the first electrical bed which included in its design a teas maid, a television and radio and a mechanism that could elevate or lower the angle of the bed. It was a first……
It was a well known Hollywood tactic to change actors’ biographical information for publicity purposes. Even back in the silent era, names were changed to make them sound snappier, more attractive or less ethnic. Ages were changed to make actors appear younger and older. Height, weight and even birthdays were manipulated by the studios. One…
Here is an interesting snippet from Spinwatch taken from The Japan Times, November 21, 2007 “A report written in 1959 by Mark May, a Yale University professor and expert on psychological warfare, detailed the extensive operations by the United States Information Service (USIS) in Japan after the end of World War II. The report was…
If you ask any Circus proprietors how business has been going, and they have suffered the effects of poor attendance, they will all notoriously reply “we starved in……….” The great U.S. circus publicist, Frank Caplan, saved one such desperate Circus (whose name I have sadly forgotten) from bankruptcy by selling advertising space on the side…
One of the greatest PR exercises after the second world war was the refugee photoshoot, where little children would be photographed amidst some war torn, bomb ridden town clutching their favourite possessions.
One of the great Hollywood movie myths, created by studio publicists, was that it was actually Steve McQueen who outran the Nazis in the Great Escape with the 65 foot motorbike jump. Over the weekend this PR myth was dispelled with the death of Bud Ekins who was a well known stunt man in Hollywood….