In a field that thrives on innovation, it’s easy to forget the stories that came first. This week, we’re stepping back in time with Shelley Spector, co-founder of the Museum of Public Relations, the world’s first and only museum dedicated to preserving the history of the field.
From her early career producing award-winning campaigns to her close friendship with Edward Bernays, the father of PR, Shelley has spent decades championing the importance of knowing where our profession came from. In this episode, she shares the inspiration behind the museum, the power of historical context in shaping modern strategies, and why today’s PR pros can’t afford to ignore the past.
Tune in as we explore the intersection of legacy, leadership, and learning in the world of public relations.
imPRessions S3 EP 10 Transcript
Jenn
Hey, Kalli.
Kalli
Hey, Jenn.
Jenn
So, did you know that there is an actual, authentic PR museum in New York City?
Kalli
I actually heard about it recently and have been wanting to learn more and potentially go there.
Jenn
It’s a little gem. I have been there. I brought a couple of people from our agency for a little afternoon field trip. It’s really cool. It was founded by Shelley Spector, who is actually today’s guest. She’s gonna talk to us a little bit about founding it, why she founded it, and what people can expect from it. But essentially, it holds like timeless PR artifacts from back in the day when PR was not as digital and digitally focused as it is today. So I think it’s gonna be really cool to talk to Shelley about what visitors can expect when they visit.
Kalli
Amazing. Let’s welcome her on.
Jenn
1997, our guest Shelley Spector co-founded the Museum of Public Relations: The world’s first and only museum dedicated to preserving and exhibiting the history of the field. Chartered by the New York State Department of Education. The museum is filled with timeless artifacts that capture the essence and core of PR. Her impressive career produced award-winning campaigns and close friendship with Edward Bernays, a PR staple, has made the museum a go-to location for budding and seasoned PR professionals in New York City. Today we’ll discuss the inspiration behind the museum and its importance in the industry. Hi, Shelley, so excited to chat with you today.
Shelley
I’m excited to chat with you.
Kalli
Hi, Shelly. So the Museum of Public Relations, as Jenn said, is located in New York City. It’s the first dedicated museum for the PR industry. What inspired you to create it?
Shelley
Well, first of all, I think that PR is misunderstood by almost every other field, right? Especially the fields that are adjacent to us, I mean, marketing, advertising, digital, social. You know, PR essentially has, you know, not a great reputation, but that’s because other industries don’t understand us, I believe, and certainly the general public does not. And one of the missions of the museum is to create recognition for the work that we’ve done as an industry over the past century. And the founder of the modern-day public relations industry, who termed the phrase “council public relations,” was Edward Bernays, who is considered one of the fathers of public relations. And the other father, of course, is Ivy Lee. And these two men, I mean think about the working and inventing a whole new field that you have no case studies to look at, no play books, no precedents, no pioneers to study back in the early 1900s, but they just kind of did it and took an industry that had not existed before and created something that was is very much necessary in today’s environment.
Jenn
For our listeners, I went to the museum with a couple of our people from the office and a couple of interns and got to have an experience with hands-on with the artifacts and really kind of understanding the story behind each of these things that are so instrumental to the PR industry today. And Shelley, I wanna ask you because you just touched on a little bit about Edward Bernays. You’ve told me personally the story behind your friendship with him. Can you tell our listeners a little bit more about your relationship, what he taught you and ultimately how he became sort of the inspiration behind founding the museum?
Shelley
Ok, certainly it’s a very important story to tell. I ran into him accidentally when I was giving a seminar in 1985. And that was, you know, what a surprise to run into a man like this. He was 94 at the time, and he was also giving a seminar, which was called “2 Days With Edward Bernays”. And we struck up a friendship. He invited my husband and I up to his home in April of 1986, and there began a nine and a half year friendship and professional relationship that changed everything for us. Because it was like learning from the wisest man that we’ve ever met, and knowing how much he was impacted. And subsequently, the industry was impacted by his uncle, actually a double uncle, Sigmund Freud, who everybody knows, right? When you talk about the relationship between the two, everybody in the room will go, “I get it now, I get it now,” because everybody kind of instinctively knows that psychology and sociology play a role in the creation of PR campaigns. They never knew why. And one of the missions is to explain the roots of public relations, as far as Bernays was concerned, as an applied social science. So Bernays never looked at public relations as, oh, we’ll do this post, or we’ll send out a press release. He looked at when he was creating campaigns, he looked and studied the professionally studying the audiences that he was reaching, this is the first time researchers ever used in public relations or any other communications field. So he kind of did it upside down from the way it’s approached today. So today we mostly will look first at what are the tactics we could use. And what he did instead was he looked at the audiences he needed to reach, and it could be five, ten different audiences, but he studied all of them, and he broke down his campaign to target each of them and understand their motivations, their likes, dislikes, their own personal situations in life, and then what they needed to hear. This is going back to 1923. And he used psychoanalysts as people to interview the audiences and to better understand their own psychology, and understand how to create campaigns that would impact them. So when I first heard this in April 1986, they said “oh my god”, our industry needs to hear this because our industry is not practicing what he first invented, less than 100 years ago, back in the 1980s, but now it’s 100 years ago. And I brought back videotapes that we had made from that day. Understand that these were kind of primitive videotapes, because the portable video camera had just come out, had just been invented, and it was a real schlep, as you can imagine, to carry all the stuff around. And he had never seen a video camera before, which is a whole other story. So that was kind of funny to teach him how video cameras work. He gave us these oral histories, which we still show today. They’re priceless. They’ve been seen tens of thousands of times by students and scholars around the world; they’re the only existing video case studies that he’s done. And they tell amazing stories of ideas that he came up with and ideas that worked and explained why they were. And also through these, you can see the impact of his uncle Freud’s teachings.
Kalli
Honestly, that’s so special that you were able to capture those, because otherwise like we would never have that. And it’s so crazy, like how the technology evolves, even from what he was doing 100 years ago when he was teaching, to even 20 years ago or 40 years ago when you were able to just first capture these videos. And now today that we’re able to share them, that actually leads me into my next question is, how do you decide what artifacts and pieces are featured in the museum? And like, how do you even collect those, like, tell us, you know, what’s on display right now? And how did you get some of those pieces?
Shelley
Ok, so let’s go back to 1997. The family had… Bernays had passed at a hundred and three and half. He had willed to us a lot of his stuff, you know a truck worth of stuff. So if you go to the museum, you’ll see a lot of his things there. But some of the most important things we took back to New York were the inbox that was sitting on his desk. And the inbox is fascinating. First of all, nobody knows what an inbox is anymore. When I asked classes today, what is this? I have no idea, they say a wooden box. I explained that you have an inbox on your computer, right? This is where it comes from. And in that inbox, as with all inboxes, you could see what’s important to him and what was important to him on the day he died. This is directly from exactly the day that he had passed away. So nobody had fooled with the content or the order of the content. But you see in there articles written by his wife, and one of them was called A Wife Is Many Women, because his wife, Doris Fleischman, was a professional herself, but also a mother and was living in the 20s and 30s, raising children, you know, in the old-fashioned way. But it also wanting to be a professional but couldn’t at the time. So that’s a very interesting story if we go down that road one day. You’ll also see in there a lot of pamphlets of translations of his uncle Sigmund Freud. There are these little booklets because of back then they were not online, obviously. So these are one of a kind, they may not be any other paper versions of these writings from Freud. And think about that. If we did not take them, they would just be gone. I’m so glad that we did take them. And that’s why today we are so interested in getting the papers, physical papers, not digital copies of people who are today pioneers. We still consider pioneers trailblazers in the industry. Because when they leave this world, so do their papers and priceless work that they’ve done. So once we got the Bernays stuff in the room that we were then using as a museum, we then opened up things to other pioneers. Unfortunately, we heard from the biographer of Ivy Lee, who said, we’re leaving in our house in Maryland, and we have boxes and boxes of stuff from Ivy Lee. You want it? Are you interested? Are you kidding? So we drove a truck down to the shores of Maryland and picked up all of these boxes of Ivy Lee stuff. One of the most interesting things that we found was Ivy Lee’s 1929 address book. Now, any address book from that time is going to be interesting because it’s missing the telephone numbers. It’s missing the email. All it has is a street address, maybe without even a zip code. But what was special about Ivy Lee’s book is that he didn’t have you know, his grandmother in there or his cousins in there, like perhaps our address books would have. But he had the Vanderbilts, he had the Astors, he had the Forbes, he had everybody who was anybody in early 20th-century society in New York. These were all his colleagues. So, it shows you that in Ivy Lee’s day and Bernays’ day, public relations was way up here, you know, considered high status because of who they ran around with in their social circles. And they were… at the time, Bernays and Ivy Lee both were dealing shoulder to shoulder with CEOs at the time and very important people. And look at where we are today, you know, our clients may be managers or directors. They are not going to be necessarily CEOs of Fortune 100 companies as they were 100 years ago. So what happened in the intervening years? Why did the pr industry get pushed down as a sport, as a poor stepchild, perhaps to the marketing people? And this is, I think, an issue that all of us can relate to today. What happened? I don’t know, but it’s something that’s worth studying. And since then, we’ve diversified our holdings so that we have pioneers who have not gotten the recognition that they deserve to get who are left out of the history books. For instance, Joe Baker, in 1934, started the first black-owned PR agency in Philadelphia. He was also one of the first black chapter heads of the PRSA chapter. We have Inez Kaiser from Kansas City, who was the first black woman to open a PR firm in the country that we know of. And so it’s what an inspiring story she also invented, “Soul Food”; she invented the phrase “Soul Food”. So what had happened was she wrote a book called Southern Cookery, which kind of was a flop. It sounds boring, but then she got this idea. Why don’t I give it a better name, a sexier name, a name that will resonate with society? So one day she came up with the phrase “Soul Food”, didn’t change the recipes, but now it had the sexy title to it. She sends it off to Barbara Walters at The Today Show, and they invited her on to show them how to cook southern food. It was amazing that she would have the courage to do this in the late 50s, early 60s, right? So she’s a real inspiration, especially to the diverse students that we have coming to the museum. She opened her PR firm in the height of the Jim Crow era. Her firm was opened in 1957. Real estate brokers in downtown Kansas City where she wanted an office, were not too happy about her moving in, and they didn’t want to rent to a woman, much less a black woman. But she threatened them that she would tell the local affiliate stations. If you don’t rent to me, I’m gonna get this on the air. And right away, all these brokers were giving her keys to various offices around town. So we’ve expanded the people that we originally were featuring, more women, more people of color, gender diversity. And we are certainly missing a lot of people, I’m sure, but we’re doing our best to diversify the history of the profession. And if I, you know, if I had the rest of the spring free, I would spend my time writing a history, a diverse history book, because today the history books only include three white men: P.T. Barnum, Ivy Lee, and Bernays. This is not the truth, you know, where publishers have been whitewashing history all along. And this is just an unfair way to treat the history of the profession. And so one of the objectives of the museum is to showcase role models that will create enthusiasm and inspiration among the black and other students of color today.
Jenn
I think that’s incredible. And I know we talked a little bit about that when we went to visit the museum and you do have artifacts and stories and newspaper clippings kind of pressed against the entire museum to showcase some of these really amazing people that aren’t usually heard of in the same way that Bernays is. And I think it’s really amazing that you are putting a voice there and you’re making sure that people are aware of the amazing things they’ve done. With that said, I know that I actually never had learned about Edward Bernays or really any of like the founders of PR in that regard, like I had heard the name as I’m in PR now today, but in college, I never really heard about him and never really heard about how like PR really started. And I think it’s a really important topic, especially for the younger generations coming into it. I know you touched on it a little bit throughout the conversation today. But what are some of the things that Edward Bernays did teach us in terms of PR? I know you talked about maybe not always adhering to the technology and not always relying on that in terms of in the foundation of our practice. But what are some of the other things that professionals, the younger professionals, especially today, can learn from Edward Bernays and the vision he had for PR?
Shelley
I think that, if we have a few case studies that are online from Edward Bernays, telling those stories, from those case studies, what you learn is that the most valuable thing he did was create new ideas, new ways of thinking. And so the focus is on imagination, innovation, creativity, and not on the tactics. So I think the major thing is to know the value of big ideas. And this is something that I talked about throughout my career. When I owned an agency for 32 years, and even before that, I always try to get people to understand that one big idea is a whole lot better than a whole bunch of little ideas. And also the value of being newsworthy. A lot of times today, kids don’t even know what I’m talking about with being newsworthy. Oh my God, they don’t even know the news. Jennifer, I can relate. When I studied journalism, we had one class about PR. That was an elective; I took it, and it was a pointless class. It was all about events, taking reporters out to lunch. It was just a kind of stupid, superficial class. I would never want to be in that industry. And then when I got out to the working world and there were limits on what women could do in journalism, especially broadcast journalism. I went into PR and found that this was the most creative industry you could possibly be in. So I really encourage people to look at this business as one of the most creative, without restrictions, that exists on the planet. If you feel yourself to be somebody who likes to have ideas, some people are, they get off and just having big ideas out of nowhere, you could also train yourself to know when it’s a good idea. That’s really the most important nugget of all that you can learn from Bernays. And thereafter, you study the audiences, so you don’t study the tactics before you know what audience wants and what’s gonna motivate them. And there’s a whole lot of psychology involved there, too, which if you looked at these case studies, you would see how much of an influence Sigmund Freud had on the early life of Bernays. And by the way, here’s a secret that Bernays swore that I wouldn’t tell the industry until he died. So I’ll tell it to you guys. It was because of Bernays that Sigmund Freud got known in the U.S. So during the 20s, Sigmund Freud was still living in Vienna, and he refused to come to the U.S. as Bernays’ family had. And at some point, we have this letter, Sigmund Freud wrote to Bernays and said, “Can you really help me out here? There’s such a devaluation of the mark after World War I. We really don’t have the money that we used to. I especially cannot find any Cuban cigars in all of Austria.” So first the Bernays did was he got another pioneer with him, it’s Carl Byoir, to go down to Cuba, which happened to be his client at the time, pick up a box of Cuban cigars, take a ship to Vienna and give his uncle Freud, a box of Cuban cigars, which he wasn’t able to get in all of Austria at the time. But what Bernays followed up with was, if you can send me your book drafts or some of the books that he had already published, or his lectures, I will get them translated in the U.S. and you may will become a common name here or you know, a bit of a star, because people here have no idea what psychology or psychoanalysis is all about. The response was Freud said Americans will never understand psychology or psychoanalysis. And Bernays said, let’s see, he got the lectures translated, put it in a book, sold it. And this is what kept Sigmund Freud financially afloat in the 1920s and 30s. And you know, in the 30s, of course, Freud was sent away from his home because he was Jewish, and he fled to London with his family. And that house eventually became the Freud Museum in England. And if you’re ever in London, that’s something worth seeing.
Jenn
It always comes back to PR.
Kalli
That’s so amazing. And like my mind is now like slowly being blown. I’m learning so much from this conversation. And I actually have to say i’m very grateful for my education experience in PR I went to Hofstra and they do have a really great program that does the history is taught along with the tactics and like how to think I liked it so much, I went back for my masters, like I was like, let me just keep going like it was great. So like even some of the stories that you’re telling the people you’re talking about, like I’m familiar with, but hearing these like amazing history stories is like, I’m just like this is so interesting and so unique. It just makes me excited to work in the field that I’ve been working in already for such a long time, but just continuing to learn these things, even as unfortunately no longer a fresh chicken. But just still learning about these things gives you that excitement that like when you’re still in school and you’re learning about it for the first time. So again, I really do hope that so many people listen to this conversation and decide that they wanna come. And you did mention that the museum does host a lot of diverse events. You’ve had some events dedicated to black history and LGBTQ+ experiences in PR. Can you tell us a little bit more about these events and then the reception that they received?
Shelley
Here’s how the first diversity event happened. It was not something that I originated in my own mind, like something that we needed. It just didn’t occur to me. And sometimes you need to be exposed. You need to be ashamed into having an idea. Here’s what happened. The GW class, a master’s class in public relations, came all the way up from Washington to come to the PR museum back, it was 2016, and a lot of the class were young black women, and they were walking around the exhibits. This is when we were up at Baruch College. One of the girls raised her hand and said to me, “Professor,” I was a professor back then at Baruch, “how come nobody here looks like me?” Oh my God, you know the cartoons with the head explosion, that’s what I felt like. And I looked at her professor, and I said, “She is so right.” And I said, this was October of 2016, I said we’re gonna fix that. Trust me, by the next Black History Month, we’re gonna address the situation, so we created the world’s first Black PR History Month. And in early February, February 9th, the night of the biggest snowstorm that we had in the city for 50 years, we had the very first Black PR History Event, focusing on PR pioneers that nobody had ever heard of. And it was extraordinary, absolutely extraordinary. But a lot of black students were crying, because it was the first time they ever saw themselves in the history, valued in the history. So that, to me, was the most important event we’ve ever done. And we’ve done, maybe for the events since, and then focusing on various groups and diversity. This year, we’ve taken a little bit of a pivot. We’re focusing, so far, on the first event we did this year was about DEI and how we deal with it under this administration. The second event was about AI and public relations. And that’s an urgent thing to look at, especially the ethics. And how do we best use it? So we’re safe. On April 24th, we’re having what I think is really one of the most important events we’ll ever do. That’s about how communications is a matter of life and death in pandemics. What was done right the last time? What can we learn from the last time? We have on the panel, we have a couple of academics, and we also have two leaders from Edelman and from Real Chemistry talking about their hands-on day-to-day history of what they did during COVID, which is fascinating. And now we have to deal with bird flu and measles. What do we do now? What’s interesting is that I said that the PR has impacted heavily on 20th-century history. We have examples in the museum of pandemics of the past and how they were handled. And some of them were handled very well. And if you study that, that was the 1918 Spanish flu, Woodrow Wilson put an embargo in a newspaper, writing about the flu. So people just had no idea about it. He didn’t want it known to the enemy because during that time, we were engaged in World War I. But very few people put together the fact that we were fighting a world war during the same time as they were experiencing one of the worst epidemics in history. That’s something interesting to look at if you want a good example of healthcare communications during a real crisis. Look at how polio was handled. Of course, we had a president himself who was afflicted during that time, and perhaps that opened up a lot more opportunities than if there wasn’t a president who was afflicted with polio, but the communications done that were so creative and inventive, and done for the very first time, we managed to get Hollywood involved in telling the message, to send a dime. Every child should send a dime to the White House. It will be like The March of Dimes, and that’s how the phrase was coined, but then it was a matter of, you know the vaccine had come out. And so back then, there was a little vaccine hesitancy. Nothing like it is today, nothing like it is today. And so remember, polio was, mainly afflicted children, and it afflicted children and every summer. So during the summers, during the hot summers before air conditioning, most places, kids were kept inside because the parents were afraid that the kid would get exposed. So when Sabin invented the flu vaccines, it was very, relatively easy to get the kids vaccinated. This was not an era where there was any disinformation that I know of about the vaccine. And what was the kind of tactics that were used to reach these audiences? It is very interesting. What kind of spokespeople were engaged to get the word out there. So these are very interesting case studies that those of us who are involved in communicating about pandemics and vaccines should be looking at. Now, as we know, history repeats itself. That’s why you see financial analysts on TV talking about the tariffs that were created in the 1930s that are, in large part, responsible for the great depression. We need to study history so as not to repeat it,
Jenn
Shelley, this has been so incredible, and I know that I’ve already kind of heard most of this. But even hearing it a second time, it’s just so, you’re so profound in the industry. And there’s so much to learn from you. And from the museum. It truly is so incredible. New York City is the heart of public relations. So if you live in the area or visiting, be sure to stop by the Museum of Public Relations, filled with historic artifacts that have shaped the world of PR as we know it today. Thank you so much for being a guest, educating Kalli and myself and our listeners on the history of museum and why it’s a go-to for PR pros today.
Shelley
Thank you so much for having me.
Jenn
Of course. As we venture more into season three, be sure to follow us on social media and look out for new episodes every other Wednesday. To reach out, you know where to find us: impressions@pollackgroup.com. See you next time.
