PR is older than you think.
We’re all taught that a guy named Edward Bernays invented the practice of PR. Which is interesting, because he actually wrote that the elements of PR are “as old as people.” Which is true…noting that he says that the elements consist of “informing people, persuading people, or integrating people with people.” History is littered with examples—a professor at Buffalo notes that Columbus used the trappings of royalty to wow the natives…Lewis and Clark melted things with a magnifying glass to accomplish the same purpose. There’s the scandal-presses in the revolutionary era, pamphleteering…you get the idea.
Here’s one of my favorites, from London, 1751. I first read this in The Book of Gin by Richard Barnett.
The brief is this. Beer has been the dominant beverage. To finance a war, the English government lowered the cost of licenses to sell gin. It worked. There were two problems. First, the war ended and the soldiers came home and discovered, ounce for ounce, the gin achieved drunkenness much faster and cheaper than beer. The drunken soldiers proceeded to wreck the place. Second is that every shilling spent on gin was not spent on beer.
NSFW in 1751
So, the beer lobby rallied. One principal tactic was the engraving we are reviewing here, by William Hogarth. If you need the premise explained, you’re reading the wrong blog. The message here is not subtle. For example…here we have a close-up of the gin pane. The delirious mother, the insensate soldier, the neglected baby, the child fighting with a dog for a bone.
I don’t think anyone had any questions about what the point was. Which is part of what I take from this story. Pretty often I run across people who want to weave their point into a tapestry of soothing text. (Famous phrase: We want to be direct, but not too direct.) The argument is that people will get the point.
They might. They might not. But for my money, if there’s something they need to know, I’d advise stating it directly. There might be a small backlash, but if you' bury your message you only avoid a backlash because you never made your point.
Additionally, the distribution is interesting. In this case, because it was an engraving, buying this work was very cheap. Which meant it was widely distributed. That would include on the wall of establishments selling beer, as well as in public view. We face the same issues and can learn lessons here. They told a story in a provocative way that would get people talking and it was easy for them to “share” it.
Beyond this, they used another tactic we would be familiar with. The hired an academic to study whether the income gin was bringing in was more than the carnage caused by gin-fueled drunks. Spoiler alert: IT WASN’T.
Don’t act like you’ve never used this tactic.
Last thing. Our modern minds might find the messaging to be ridiculously extreme and more in line with how people might have communicated in 1751. Maybe…but I would point you to the future states that are predicted in the Presidential election as a counter-point. (Specific example: vulnerable elderly woman calls 911 and no one answers).
To close the loop, it did work. Parliament raised the costs of licenses for gin. (This had been tried previously, but had only driven gin production underground. The 1751 Act raised the cost enough to impact its availability but not enough to create a black market).
As Barnett says, “The Gin Craze was over.”
There’s a ton of lessons in this story. But the most germane one is this: public relations is about human nature. Technology might have changed and the issues might have changed, but the things that motivate people are very stable, even over centuries. We can learn about today by studying history.