Selling The Brooklyn Bridge

They jammed the streets, 2.1 million of them, New Yorkers and tourists alike, crowded into windows and crammed onto fire escapes on a sunny spring day to celebrate the 100th birthday of the Brooklyn Bridge. Mayor Ed Koch, in a cap of Dodger blue, led the eight-block-long parade of marching bands and floats, vintage carriages and costumed school-children across the East River.

With the Brooklyn Bridge birthday party last May 24, the New York firm of Dudley-Anderson-Yutzy Public Relations Inc. (D-A-Y) pulled off the public relations triumph of 1983. Some 1,200 journalists brought the story coast to coast. All three network morning shows covered it live. There were TV crews from Brazil, Japan, and five European countries, along with a documentary film crew sent by the makers of Brooklyn Bridge, Italy's best-selling chewing gum.

But 41-year-old Lenore Cooney, D-A-Y's account supervisor in charge of the celebration, ignored the hoopla. She had had enough of the press. After 18 months of researching their stories, finding their angles, doing their legwork, providing their photographs, and filling their airtime, she was sick of servicing the media monster. Rather than watch the parade, she sat quietly inside Brooklyn Borough Hall, chain-smoking Vantages and chatting with policemen who dropped in for the free coffee provided.

For today, her work was done. She had been given the green light to develop the program as she pleased. Now it would take an agencywide effort to make it succeed. Jean Way Schoonover, 61-year-old D-A-Y president, chief executive officer, and co-owner, was delegated to get Mayor Koch to the platform on time. Her sister, 55-year-old Barbara Hunter, D-A-Y executive vice-president and co-owner, brought Manhattan Borough president Andrew Stein. It took another 26 carefully drilled members of D-A-Y's professional staff of 48 to shepherd the members of the press and see to their passes, parking stickers, and shuttle-bus schedules.

"What can you say about a 100-year-old bridge in need of refurbishment?" Cooney had asked herself when she first got the account. Plenty, as it turned out. One reporter called the centennial "this year's version of the royal wedding." Total U.S. television time reached 18 hours; articles appeared in every magazine from Life to Popular Mechanics; the stack of newspaper clippings climbed to six feet.

There were, inevitably, the minor glitches. An overexuberant burst of water from the mayor's fireboat doused some of the fireworks. And a group of runners flown in from the West Coast to run the bridge were sent, by accident, over the wrong roadway. With no finish line or winner's tape to stop them they disappeared into the maze of lower Manhattan. But the client, The 1983 Brooklyn Bridge Centennial Commission Inc. felt the results were worth the $2.5 million spent. "Extraordinarily well managed," said Nanette Rainone, director of communications for the office of the Brooklyn Borough president. Commission chairman Richard Perry agreed. "D-A-Y did a super job" he said. "Their enthusiasm made the difference."

The press, usually jaundiced, was laudatory as well. CBS Radio even sent a thank-you note. "I usually have nothing but bad things to say about p.r. agencies. But D-A-Y was absolutely wonderful," New York Times reporter Deirdre Carmody marveled.

Selling the Brooklyn Bridge would seem, on the face of it, a singular marketing challenge. "But public relations is public relations," Cooney insists. Profit or nonprofit, product or event, the process stays the same, concept to story to media sale. The press wants news. The client wants a bottom-line payoff -- in sales for a corporation, in fundraising support for a nonprofit client. It takes ideas and execution: Find a theme, develop the news angles, "then follow up, follow up."

You might not know D-A-Y, America's oldest public relations agency, but you probably know its clients' products, from Armagnac and New Zealand lamb to Eagle and Atari computers, Watney's beer and Panadol pain reliever. For 74 years, the agency has been turning commodities into products with a distinctive market position by getting them editorial space and airtime. D-A-Y made orange juice the vitamin C drink in the 1930s for the Florida Department of Citrus. Hired by an industry promotional program known as The Banana Bunch, D-A-Y helped hike the average American's annual consumption of bananas from 17.4 pounds to more than 22 pounds in 10 years by changing the image of the fattening banana -- as in banana split -- into that of a potassium rich, health-food snack. D-A-Y cast disk manufacturer Verbatim Corp. as the model of high-tech humanity with such innovative programs as "Tone Up at the Terminals," a Jane-Fonda-goes-Silicon-Valley exercise book for the floppy-disk user.

It is easy to dismiss public relations; the image of the touped flack cranking out overwrought hype on the mimeograph machine dies hard. Unlike advertising, public relations seems hard to judge -- product and payoff alike -- dollars thrown with blind hope into the marketing mix.

But Neil Nix, of Glenbrook Laboratories Division of Sterling Drug Inc., who watched the development of the agency's plan for Panadol acetaminophen, knows better. Consumers can -- and do -- dismiss advertising. But they don't dismiss news. An article in a newspaper or magazine, an interview or a report on the nightly news, gains credibility because the reporter provides a third-party endorsement, whether it is for the story of the Brooklyn Bridge or the low-fat truth about bananas. Advertising can stress a single point; public relations can tell a story in depth, correct myths, position the product, stress a corporate history and personality. "If you generate interesting material, get it out to the papers and on to the talk shows, it brings the message to the consumer in a more believable way than advertising," Nix insists.