Father of public relations industry
Harold Burson, a public relations giant who co-founded Burson-Marsteller, died Jan. 10 in Memphis. He was 98.
Soft-spoken and unassuming, Burson was considered a chief architect of the modern public relations industry. A 1999 survey by PRWeek magazine named Burson the most influential PR figure of the 20th century. He went to his Manhattan office each day well into his 90s.
Clients included major corporations as well as the British government, the Saudi royal family and the regime of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.
The firm was known for its crisis-management work. Burson advised Johnson & Johnson after the cyanide-laced-Tylenol murders in 1982, and in 1984 represented Union Carbide after a gas leak killed thousands of people near its pesticide plant in India.
“We are being paid to tell our client’s side of the story,” Burson told the New York Times that year. “We are in the business of changing and moulding attitudes, and we aren’t successful unless we move the needle.”
Burson began his career working as a freelance journalist, but formed his own PR firm in 1946, concluding that public relations would be more lucrative.
Seven years later, he partnered with advertising executive William Marsteller to form Burson-Marsteller. By 1984, it was the world’s largest PR firm by net fee income, with 4,100 employees in 42 offices worldwide.
The company undoubtedly benefitted from the Tylenol case, in which seven people in the Chicago area died from apparent tampering with bottles on store shelves.
Burson also worked with Pan Am after the 1988 Lockerbie bombing in Scotland, and with repressive governments in Nigeria, Argentina and Indonesia. Its efforts on behalf of those governments (and companies such as cigarette giant Philip Morris) garnered notoriety in some quarters, with commentator Rachel Maddow declaring in 2012 that “evil has Burson-Marsteller on speed dial.”
Burson rejected that characterization, saying he had rejected the Libyan government, a “major oil company” trying to lift sanctions on Iraq and the National Rifle Association.
Harold Burson was born in Memphis on Feb. 15, 1921.
In 1979, he sold Burson-Marsteller to ad agency Young & Rubicam, serving as CEO until 1988, a year after the death of Marsteller. The firm merged with Cohn & Wolfe in 2018.
WE ARE IN THE BUSINESS OF CHANGING AND MOULDING ATTITUDES.