The resourcefulness of the tobacco giants in the 1900’s and their alacrity to find new audiences is sometimes astounding.  In order to influence women in the pleasures of the tobacco leaf, way back at the turn of the 20th century, the large tobacco companies actually targeted the suffragette movement, encouraging them to smoke in public, a pursuit which was a social taboo at the time.  Soon after that, women were again a main focus and cigarettes were advertised as slimming aids, helping women to stave off those hunger pangs and stay beautiful and slim.  In the 1920’s when smoking in…

These days it’s common place to see wags in provocative clothing, short skirts and low cut tops. They are just various no names who try to attract attention by means of their dress, and whose ends are usually as an MTV reality TV host. In 1922, an English publicist St. John Morton was involved in one of the earliest attempts at getting the media of the day to pay attention to a woman because of her dress. Dolores Denis Denison arrived at the prestigious private view of the King Tut Exhibition, desperate to gain entry, dressed as an Egyptian mummy….

Encouraging news on the book front – http://pfdbooks.wordpress.com/2008/04/16/the-last-day/ PFD,my agents, have been trying to sell the international rights to the book at the London Book Fair. My book, The Fame Formula, hits the bookshops in August. The Fame Formula is an account of how Hollywood’s fixers, fakers and star makers shaped the publicity industry. It is a history of the creators of that industry, who stepped out of circus life carrying the legacy of PT Barnum and applied it to Vaudeville, the movie industry and to the world that sprang from their legacy. Hopefully I take the reader on a fascinating journey in search…

It’s so difficult editing my book, the Fame Formula, as the final deadline approaches for the August release date. It all seems so ominous. The main problem is having to leave out all the Jim Moran stunts.  During the picture research for my book, Alex, the library ferret, has turned up even more Moran exploits.  Moran came up with a  device to monitor terror using various scientific devices as part of a stunt to promote a number of horror films he was looking after.  Moran shows a great talent for regurgitating the same stunt for maximum column inches. He publicized…

These commercials that appeared in days gone by are laughable by today’s standards, but I wonder which advertising campaigns that we take for granted today will be looked back upon with the same amount of derision?  I dare say numerous products will carry health warnings in years to come, that we currently accept without question.

It doesn’t require a journey to Hollywood to notice the effects of the Oscar campaign, that great PR institution that rules the fortunes of the movie world. The Oscars were created as a way of promoting the movies, but they have become, in the hands of Henry Rogers, Warren Cowan and the endless array of flacks who have followed in their footsteps down the ragged edges of the red carpet, always in the wake of the latest Oscar nominated star, an international multi-ringed circus of the gaudiest proportions. Phineas Barnum would be proud of the enterprising zeal and self-approbating hoo-ha…

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 would be Charles Leef’s escapade that would really distress Morgan. Morgan was the nation’s most powerful banker and to see him being cross examined caused a media frenzy.  The court had to request photographers to stop snapping flashbulbs and moving around because nobody could see…

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 upside down instead.  Considered a freak, he created a great deal of interest from journalists whom Butler allowed to watch the boy writing upside down.  The photographers took shots of the boy’s topsy turvy writing and of course, the journalists had to check that what…

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 playing the piano.  However, the deception was discovered by a local journalist who found the instrument to be a pianola not a piano, and Professor James Burt sadly had to hand back his award, but only after Moran had succeeded in getting every major paper…

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… and generated endless pages of coverage, despite the fact that one of the models who appeared in the photo shoot was actually electrocuted.  Moran managed to cover that up even though the girl was left in a coma.  It had been the fault of the…

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 renowned case of shifting a birthday to add some kind of symbolism was that of Humphrey Bogart. Throughout his film career, Bogart’s birth date was listed as Christmas Day 1899.  Later the truth came out that Humphrey had in fact been born on the more…

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 recently uncovered in the National Archives in Washington by Kenneth Osgood, an assistant professor of history at Florida Atlantic University. The report reveals that 23 of 50 USIS-sponsored programs were not publicly identified as U.S. funded projects. USIS sponsored radio news and commentary programs “which…

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 of the Circus’ prize elephant, Bessie.  The idea was extremely successful, both in terms of selling advertising space, and also by generating inordinate amounts of publicity which luckily saved the Circus.  Oh, for those politically incorrect times when a captive animal could be used to…

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. If your movie needed a motorbike stunt, Ekins was your man and it was in fact Bud who rode the motorbike to freedom in The Great Escape. McQueen was prevented from stunts like this for insurance reasons.