In his work for Beechnut Packing Company, a leading pork producer, Bernay had the opportunity to contribute to another twentieth-century epidemic, heart disease. To convince Americans that a heavy breakfast of bacon, a Beechnut product, and eggs, promoted health, Bernays conducted a survey of 5,000 doctors, asking them if heavy breakfasts supported health. In a national advertising campaign with the headline, “Physicians urge heavy breakfasts to improve health,” he presented their favorable positive response as if it were a scientific study, a technique of third-party endorsement later used by other industries to promote unhealthy products. Sales of bacon soared.
From 1980 to 2000, the number of public relations specialists increased by 56 percent, with the largest number working in the corporate sector. Many new hires went to the mega-PR firms that emerged. WPP, founded in 1985, calls itself the world’s largest communications services group, employs 153,000 people working in 2,400 offices in 107 countries. Burson Marsteller, established in 1953, became the world’s largest public relations firm by 1983. Edelman, the largest independent PR company, employed 3,600 staff in 53 cities around the world. Some companies became to go-to source for corporations with a health-related image problem. Hill & Knowlton has been employed by 50 percent of global Fortune 500 companies and has helped the tobacco, infant formula, lead, vinyl chloride, and other industries fight off government regulations of products associated with health harms.
Increasingly, these companies became communications supermarkets, with the ability to provide corporations with help on lobbying, crisis management, and strategic planning, as well as more traditional public relations. Working on similar issues for multiple clients enabled these PR companies to gain the expertise needed to master the common tasks their clients expect: creating favorable opinion for a new product or brand, resisting government regulation, managing a crisis due a safety threat, or turning back a new tax. As government downsized, the corporate capacity to manipulate government super-sized, further tilting the asymmetrical power relationship.