Joint press release from a consortium of 8 oil companies and the government of Iran about how the oil industry will operate there and how/whether BP will be compensated for loss in revenue due to changes to its oil contract with the country. What’s quite interesting to note here is that the release appears to […]
Advertising and PR
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Bernays on Propaganda and “Impropaganda”
Bernays on what sort of propaganda is and isn’t okay to create and amplify.
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Standard Oil Pamphlet on Red Line Agreement
An overview of Standard Oil of New Jersey’s (today ExxonMobil) activities in the Middle East, including an explanation of the “Red Line Agreement,” from the Earl Newsom Archive at UW Madison in Wisconsin.
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1946 Earl Newsom Trip to Venezuela for Standard Oil of New Jersey
A packet of documents from the Earl Newsom Papers, housed at University of Wisconsin, Madison, covering Newsom’s trip to Venezuela for his client Standard Oil of New Jersey (the company known as ExxonMobil today) to develop a PR strategy to deal with increasingly fraught labor issues in the country, and to beat back the idea […]
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Newsom Post-WWII Strategy
A fascinating strategy memo from early 1945. WWII was coming to a close, and Newsom was concerned—not that the Allies would lose, or that the companies he worked for would have to find new revenue streams once wartime purchasing ended, but that Americans had grown so used to the government taking care of them that […]
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1945 Standard Oil of New Jersey in Venezuela
A packet of documents from the Earl Newsom Papers, housed at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, chronicling Standard Oil of New Jersey’s dealings in Venezuela in 1945.
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Bernays Breakfast ad
In the 1930s, Bernays was hired by a bacon client who wanted to sell more bacon. He had the idea of working with a group of doctors to draft a study saying heavier breakfasts would be better for Americans than what they were eating at the time—lighter breakfasts of juice or coffee and toast. Before […]
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Bernays Tobacco Ad
In the 1920s, American Tobacco came to Bernays with a problem: it was taboo for women to smoke and that meant they were losing out on half the American public as customers. They asked Bernays if he could come up with a way to break the taboo, and he did by connecting smoking to women’s […]
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1921 API Meeting Minutes
From the archive of PR pioneer Ivy Lee, who helped to launch the American Petroleum Institute, these are meeting minutes from the organization’s early years.
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Meetings of First API Meeting
Meeting minutes from the very first meeting of the American Petroleum Institute, from the Ivy Lee archive.