Named Most Influential Person in PR in the 20th Century
NEW YORK-Sunday 12 January 2020 [ AETOS Wire ]
(BUSINESS WIRE) --
Harold Burson, once a 14-cents-per-column-inch stringer for a Memphis
newspaper, who reported the Nuremberg Trial for the Army radio network
in Europe and whose one-man consultancy became by 1983 the world’s
largest public relations firm, died on January 10, 2020. He was 98.
Burson
played a leading role in transforming the practice of public relations
from a cottage industry to a global business that engaged thousands of
employees. He stepped down as Chief Executive Officer of
Burson-Marsteller in 1988 but continued in an active capacity for more
than a quarter century and came to work nearly every day well into his
90s.
In 1999, a survey by PRWeek, a
leading public relations industry trade publication, named Burson as
“the century’s most influential PR figure.” This recognition reflected
his role as counselor to and confidant of corporate chief executive
officers, government leaders and heads of public sector institutions.
His PRWeek citation read:
“The
architect of the largest public relations agency in the world today
(1999), Burson-Marsteller Chairman Harold Burson’s contribution is
immense in many other ways besides. He started practicing the concept of
integrated marketing decades before the term was even invented. He
brought PR into the advertising business at Young & Rubicam as an
equal (it’s arguably never been achieved again). His development of
training programs set the benchmark that other agencies have only
recently caught up with. He has personally sponsored and supported
programs, industry bodies, universities and charities to improve the
profession. His mentoring of talent has spawned a whole wave of
ex-Burson PR agency start-ups. He created a unique Burson culture that
still unites former employees. And, last but not least, his personal
counsel has enlightened the thinking of boardrooms at many Fortune 100
companies and across the globe.”
He
was a strong proponent of the corporation’s role in society as a social
entity, insisting that the mission of a corporation was to deliver a
good product at a fair price, treat its employees fairly in terms of
compensation and retirement, deal fairly with suppliers, support
essential community activities in areas where it operated, and reward
its stockholders with a fair return on their investment. But he warned
that the principal objective of the corporation was to make a profit
that enabled it to fund its responsibilities as a social entity.
Born
February 15, 1921, in Memphis, Tennessee, the son of emigrants from
Leeds, Yorkshire, England, he started school in the third grade and
graduated from high school at age 15. He enrolled at the University of
Mississippi (Ole Miss) knowing that his campus correspondent stringer
job for the Memphis Commercial Appeal would cover his college tuition
and expenses. Six months after graduation, he accepted a public
relations position at a large engineering and architectural firm when,
as he said, “they doubled my salary from $25 to $50 per week and gave me
the use of a car.”
Burson
enlisted in the United States Army in 1943 and became part of an
engineer combat group in Europe. In 1945, he was transferred to the news
staff of the American Forces Network a month before the war ended in
Europe.
Later
in 1945, he was assigned to report on the Nuremberg Trial and was the
only reporter to obtain an interview during the trial with Associate
Justice Robert H. Jackson, the chief American prosecutor. Although
Justice Jackson had vowed not to grant interviews, Burson argued that
his audience, the American GIs who fought the war, were entitled to hear
firsthand from the chief American prosecutor. Only 24-years-old when
the Nuremberg Trial began, Burson was believed to have been the last
living reporter who covered the historic trial.
Following
his discharge from the Army in 1946, Burson opened a public relations
firm in New York in “a tiny nook in a client’s office” next to the desk
of a part-time executive assistant. Never having heard the word
“differentiation” used in a competitive sense, he described his firm as
specializing in business-to-business clients. The firm he worked for
before his Army service was in that category and he quickly learned that
few business-to-business companies employed public relations
consultants.
In
1952, Burson’s firm had a staff of five when a friend at The New York
Times, responding to a query from the owner of a Chicago advertising
agency, recommended Burson for a Pittsburgh-based project. Through this
opportunity, he came to meet William A. (Bill) Marsteller, with whom his
name was linked by a hyphen for 65 years. The Burson firm was hired for
the project – to publicize the purchase by Rockwell Manufacturing
Company of the first helicopter to be used for executive travel.
Rockwell subsequently became a full-fledged client.
Shortly
thereafter, Marsteller introduced Burson to the chief executive officer
of another client, Clark Equipment Company, which led to still more
business. The affiliation with Marsteller worked so well that Burson
proposed establishing a new company jointly owned by the two parties. It
took the name Burson-Marsteller and opened March 2, 1953 with offices
in New York and Chicago and offered “integrated communications services”
to business-to-business clients, believed to be the first to do so.
In
speeches and articles, Burson has cited two “defining moments” that
accounted for the company’s rapid growth. The first was the creation of
the European Common Market in the late 1950s. Burson’s firm was the
second to establish an office in Europe – in Geneva, Switzerland in
early 1961 – and announced its intention to become a global operation
over the next quarter century. Though still a speck on the public
relations spectrum in the U.S., Burson-Marsteller became known as “the
other international public relations firm.” During the 1960s, its annual
revenues surged tenfold, from $410,000 to $4.4 million.
The
firm’s second defining moment was its selection in 1970 by General
Motors (GM) to be its sole public relations counsel, a response to
allegations that GM hired private investigators to follow the
self-appointed public watchdog, Ralph Nader, after his scathing book
questioning the safety of GM’s highly touted Chevrolet Corvair. After
GM’s CEO was called to testify before a Congressional committee, the
company, on instructions from its board of directors, hired an outside
public relations firm to consult with management. Competing against the
two largest U.S. firms, Burson-Marsteller was chosen for the assignment,
which continued for more than a decade.
During
the 1970s, the firm’s revenues increased from $5.2 million to $28.3
million. It added about a dozen new offices in Europe, including London,
Paris, Brussels and Frankfurt, and in Asia, in Hong Kong, Tokyo and
Singapore. Its clients included both American multinationals and local
businesses.
In
1979, Burson engineered the merger of Burson-Marsteller and Marsteller
Advertising with the global advertising giant Young & Rubicam,
becoming a member of its seven-person executive committee. At the time
of the merger, Burson-Marsteller had revenues of $28.3 million and 16
offices. Four years later, when Burson-Marsteller became the world’s
largest public relations firm, it had revenues of $63.8 million and 30
offices, including branches in Latin America, Australia and the Middle
East.
One
of the firm’s specialties was crisis management, ranging from the major
Tylenol recalls in 1982 and 1985, which were often referred to as
models for corporate management in times of crisis, to the celebrated
introduction of “New Coke” and the reintroduction of Coca-Cola Classic
in 1985, an undertaking in which Burson himself was a prime participant.
After the “New Coke” debacle and the re-introduction of Coca-Cola
Classic, he summarized the exercise as “[w]e got a hole-in-one after the
ball hit the tree.” The firm also represented Union Carbide in the
aftermath of the discharge of toxic chemicals at its plant in Bhopal,
India; Pan Am Airways after the Lockerbie (Scotland) crash; and Dow
Corning following the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s decision to
ban silicone breast implants. Burson-Marsteller also had a long-time
active role in representing the Olympic Games and its corporate
sponsors.
Burson
received numerous awards from public relations organizations including
Hall of Fame designations by the Public Relations Society of America,
the Arthur W. Page Society, PRWeek, PR News, the Institute of Public
Relations, the Alan Campbell Johnson Award (England), as well as
numerous citations by colleges and universities in the United States,
Europe and China. He was awarded an honorary degree by Boston University
in 1988, and a chair in public relations was established in his name in
1995. He is also in the Hall of Fame at his alma mater, Ole Miss, and
shares a place in the Humes High School Hall of Fame in Memphis with
Elvis Presley.
He
was active in numerous public service organizations, principally the
John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. As a board member of
Kennedy Center Productions, he negotiated Japan’s $3 million
bicentennial gift in 1976 to construct the Terrace Theater. He also was
instrumental in establishing the Kennedy Center Corporate Fund in 1977.
Another
of his interests was economic education. He was chairman of the Council
on Economic Education in the early 1990s and was an active member of
the Economic Club of New York since 1979, including serving as chairman
of the organization’s centennial dinner in 2007. In conjunction with the
dinner, he proposed the creation of a Centennial Society composed of
members who contribute at least $10,000 to the establishment of a club
endowment fund.
He
was a Presidential appointee to the Commission of Fine Arts in
Washington and was a member during the deliberations that led to
building the Vietnam War Memorial and the redevelopment of Pennsylvania
Avenue in the 1980s. He also chaired the Public Relations Advisory
Committee of the U.S. Information Agency during the second Reagan
administration and under President George H.W. Bush.
In
more recent years, he was a member of the board of trustees of the
Museum of the American Revolution, which is the first museum that
relates the entire history of the American Revolution. He was also a
member of the Eisenhower Memorial Commission’s Advisory Committee.
Although
never engaged in partisan politics, he served as public relations
advisor to President Ronald Reagan after he left the White House. He did
so on the basis that his services were offered pro bono.
In
2017, at the age of 96, he published his memoir, THE BUSINESS OF
PERSUASION: Harold Burson on Public Relations (RosettaBooks).
Burson
was married to Bette Foster Burson for one month short of 63 years. He
is survived by two sons, Scott F. Burson (Wendy Liebow Burson) of
Lexington, Massachusetts and Mark Burson (Ellen Jones Burson) of
Westlake Village, Calif., and five grandchildren: Allison Burson, Esther
Burson, Wynn F. Burson (Steven Cateron), Holly Burson and Kelly Burson.
Donations may be made to the Boston University College of Communication.
About BCW
BCW
(Burson Cohn & Wolfe), one of the world’s largest full-service
global communications agencies, is in the business of moving people on
behalf of clients. Founded by the merger of Burson-Marsteller and Cohn
& Wolfe, BCW delivers digitally and data-driven creative content and
integrated communications programs grounded in earned media and scaled
across all channels for clients in the B2B, consumer, corporate, crisis
management, CSR, healthcare, public affairs and technology sectors. BCW
is a part of WPP (NYSE: WPP), a creative transformation company. For
more information, visit www.bcw-global.com.
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