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The bigger advertising agencies have their own p.r. departments, notably J. Walter Thompson. Among its recent campaigns: to publicize a marine motor firm, it arranged underwater tests to see whether outboard motors frighten fish (they don't, at least in J. Walter Thompson's view); to push a mouthwash, the agency sent a Negro model into ghetto high schools to lecture on grooming and personal hygiene.
Paging Talleyrand
One can hardly miss in some of these doings a certain surrealistic quality: there is no other way to describe those tranquil fish swimming around the churning blades, those pretty-grooming lectures to kids in smoldering ghettos. Public relations men can reach into the real world and play: arrange a conference here, a clambake there, strike now a religious chord, then a sexy blue note. This p.r. playfulness can offend, annoy and infuriate. Despite the excellence at the top of the profession, far too many p.r. men still think their chief function is to stage lunches, cocktail parties, junkets, cruises, screenings, no-news press conferences, and other nonevents. Releases are fired off without regard for destination or deadline. Throughout the entire 16 weeks that the New York Herald Tribune was struck in 1963, releases continued pouring into its offices—some of them by special messenger. This kind of p.r. work is not only wasteful, but it clogs communications where it is supposed to free them.
The main case against p.r. is not that it brainwashes people —it is not really powerful enough to do that. As New School Sociologist Ernest van den Haag says, "Public relations can seduce, but it cannot rape." What is often most troubling is that p.r. can place a kind of shield between the public and reality. It creates the feeling that smiles are not quite real, laughter not quite spontaneous, wit not quite unrehearsed, praise or blame not quite from the heart, elegance not quite instinctive, courage not quite brave and virtue not quite clean. The best p.r. men know the danger. They also know how and when to get out of the way and just let life happen. More p.r. men should learn that difficult art and adopt as their own Talleyrand's celebrated advice to diplomats: "Above all, not too much zeal."
The p.r. world is trying hard to improve not only the image but also the quality of its profession. The Public Relations Society of America is conducting a drive for state accreditation and has drawn up a Code of Professional Standards, pledging its 5,600 members to uphold "generally accepted standards of accuracy, truth and good taste." Everyone knows that such codes are virtually impossible to enforce. A stronger guarantee of good conduct lies in prosperity and self-interest. Large, thriving p.r. firms with top industrial clients hardly find it worthwhile to run shoddy, vulgar campaigns. They certainly do not underestimate the public's readiness to be gulled; but they know that in the long run, fakery does not pay off. Truth may be considerably embellished in successful p.r., but there has to be a base of truth somewhere. Even the Hollywood pressagent is beginning to learn that, though more slowly than anyone else.