Come along, fasten your seat belt and I’ll take you on a short ride through my (drum roll) triumphant career in public relations, still not quite over.
During my scramble up that ladder of success, if anyone told me to stop spinning, inventing and creating, it would be like telling the Federal Government to stop spending or President Trump, the subject of one of my books, to stop tweeting, greeting, meeting, tariffing, building ballrooms and playing golf. Good luck!
I’m the founder of the award-winning, billionaire-making, product catapulting PR firm, my bustling baby TransMedia Group, today quite grown up.
Some call me the quintessential “Spin Man,” the title of my memoir recounting my rise from a harrowing career as a newspaper reporter to the pinnacle of network television and then rocketing into the PR world where I became an accomplished commodore of PR campaigns and an expert at crisis management.
Starting as a reporter taught me something valuable that would help shape me throughout my PR life. You don’t wait for stories; you go find them or make them happen. As a reporter, I’d do whatever I had to do to get the story out.
Once I even disguised myself as a waiter at a busy airport under police lockdown to serve water to quarantined passengers of a hijacked airliner so I could interview them for a front-page story.
Smoking PR
My rocket ride didn’t start smoking until after brief tenure as an occasionally erudite college professor teaching journalism at Loyola U in New Orleans, and occasionally next door at Tulane. Then when I returned to where I had once started out in PR, Manhattan, it was a different ballgame. This one, I wanted to win!
My first job in that city that has difficulty sleeping was at Lennen & Newell, an ad agency now soundly asleep. It was then a monstrous Madison Ave agency and I was doing PR for of all things, cigarettes, promoting Kent with the Micronite Filter, once found to contain cancer-causing asbestos, which had to be removed.
Next came journalism, and a more harrowing line of work as a newspaper reporter.
Occasionally I’d get beaten up and a couple of times nearly killed covering the mayor who was then a gutsy former police official, Frank Rizzo. So, I thought I’d live longer teaching journalism than practicing it on streets that weren’t always brimming with brotherly love. That’s what had sent me down to the Big Easy.
After I gave up teaching, and returned to Manhattan, my D-A-Y job was literally that, at the pioneering PR firm, Dudley-Anderson-Yutzy (D-A-Y), the world’s oldest continually operating PR firm.
D-A-Y was established by Pendleton Dudley, purportedly at the suggestion of the founder of modern PR, Ivy Lee, who in the early 1900’s represented the Rockefeller Family. Lee originated what we now call crisis management, which ironically became one of my specialties that would work wonders for clients I would acquire, from AT&T to Tony the Tiger (Kellogg’s).
After Dudley, Anderson and Yutzy died in 1960’s, it created a leadership vacuum until 1970 when two sisters working there bought the firm. A few years later, Barbara Hunter and Jean Schoonover, would bravely, might I say, astutely, hire me.
That D-A-Y was a pioneering company in PR became evident when Pendleton Dudley retained Explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson as a celebrity spokesperson to promote eating meat. Another notable success was helping to increase the annual per person consumption of bananas in the U.S. from 17.4 pounds to more than 22 pounds over a ten-year period by highlighting the fruit’s health benefits.
Kellogg’s of Battle Creek
On my first day there, an account executive offered me one, but I told her I already had my banana with my Kellogg’s cereal. Kellogg’s was the account to which I was assigned, and I always make it a point to eat or drink my clients’ products.
In the 1930s, D-A-Y popularized orange juice in a campaign for Florida Citrus Commission. In 1983, D-A-Y ran the celebration of the Brooklyn Bridge Centennial, proclaimed by Inc what it exactly was, “a public relations triumph.”
Shortly after I was hired at D-A-Y, I was assigned to write speeches for Kellogg’s Chairman Bill LaMothe opposing the government’s efforts to break up the three leading cereal companies, which the FTC charged was an oligopoly.
In one of them I made Tony the Tiger a sympathetic hero, which was published in The New York Times. LaMothe was so happy he flew in from Battle Creek just to take me out to celebrate, of course, for breakfast!
Other D-A-Y clients included Verbatim, Kool-aid and Borden. D-A-Y represented Tabasco sauce from the 1920s until the firm was purchased by Ogilvy & Mather in 1983, which continued to operate it as a separate division until 1988.
During my career, I’ve had to reinvent myself several times, but I’ve always stuck to the premise, the harder you work, the more you’ll succeed.
Media meteoric
Nothing short of media meteoric were my many reincarnations from reporter to speech writer, to head of PR at ABC and to the #2-ranked executive at NBC.
At NBC I was vice president and PR mentor to then CEO Fred Siverman. Prior to that I was his speech writer at ABC after that network had hired me away from D-A-Y following my Kellogg’s publicity coup.
I was performing one PR coup after another at NBC until I launched my own firm in 1981 and started writing best sellers like Spin Man and King of the Condo, a satiric novel based on my tumultuous experiences as president of a Florida condo.
After starting as a newspaper reporter and then having spun myself up to the top executive ranks in network television, I next tried my hand at speech writing and corporate titans like the Chairman of Kellogg’s Company sought my talent as a wordsmith. As I said, some speeches I wrote were reprinted in The New York Times, also in Vital Speeches of the Day.
Landing a giant
When I left NBC to launch TransMedia Group in 1981, our boutique firm landed as a first client what at the time was the largest company in America, AT&T.
AT&T hired my firm to help fight the government’s attempt to force it to sell its operating companies charging it was a monopoly.
I helped Ma Bell through its disruptive divestiture, guiding then besieged chairman Charley Brown through the media underbrush up to a safe clearing where the company reinvented itself.
Besides Ma Bell, among my firm’s first clients was The City of New York, which also was quick to tap my magic with media. I was assigned to wage a PR campaign promoting fair, non-discriminatory housing in the city. The PSA campaign I created earned TransMedia a Bronze Anvil Award from the Public Relations Society of America.
We reinforced press releases and other media messages with ads on the city’s subways warning discriminators would have to answer to a mean-looking Mr. T, a professional actor/wrestler shown brandishing a clenched fist.
By that time, I was rockin’ running one of Manhattan’s most enterprising PR firms, TransMedia Group.
Among TransMedia Group’s clients were restaurants our scrumptious publicity made even more deliciously popular.
Once we sent Krispy Kreme’s secret formula in an armored Brinks truck to a new Kristy Kreme store opening in Florida.
We promoted star-studded exhibitions at the most glamorous art galleries like Pierre Cardin’s on 57th St. in Manhattan.
I particularly relished promoting sports heroes like racecar driver Scott Brayton. Whenever I was driving him on the Pacific Coast Highway to interviews, ironically he would keep urging me to slow down until one day he got the ultimate checkered flag himself in a fatal crash where I would love to watch him race at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
“Don’t Panic”
To introduce a new anti-cellulite cream for client Rexall Sundown, I had store clerks at Duane Reade Drugstores in New York wear “Don’t Panic” buttons to assure female customers there would be enough of this fabulous substance to go around. Then a piece I arranged on NBC Dateline ran nearly eight minutes, setting off $50 million in media exposure and a retail stampede resulting in $54 million in sales.
When Rexall Sundown’s founder Carl DeSantis sold the company for $1.6 billion, then purchased the energy drink Celsius, after I had introduced him to its owners then, he would credit my publicity for much of Rexall Sundown’s successes, including making OsteoBi-Flex the $100 million-a-year arthritis champ.
Today TransMedia Group) is a bilingual firm serving clients worldwide from its headquarters in Boca Raton. And my blog Madden Mischief has tons of followers and countless connections on LinkedIn.
It’s all covered in seven books I’ve written, the first titled Spin Man. Today my resourceful daughter Adrienne Mazzone is president of our firm, and along with a highly adept staff, we’re keeping our clients where and how they always should be, whether on horses or jets, in delicatessens or galleries– newsworthy!
Ben’s Best
One of my most fun PR campaigns was for Ben’s Best Kosher Deli in Queens, NY, for whom I staged a war with Contact Cold & Flu medicine. Contact was running TV commercials making fun of chicken soup as a cold remedy. So, what did I do?
I raised an army of grandmothers to protest Contact’s disparaging the sanctity of chicken soup, long considered a potent weapon for fighting colds & flu.
A PR friend of mind representing Contact loved the publicity battle angle idea and got Contact’s celebrity spokesman at the time, NBC TV’s chubby weatherman Willard Scott, to make peace with my legion of warrior grandmothers who were demonstrating allegiance to chicken soup.
Where to make peace? Where else, but at Ben’s Best Deli in Queens. You can see the victory party pictures. Yes, I sure got around making a splash in those whirlwind spin days and I’m still at it, ever asking prospects this same question: Who does your PR?
Just the other day we put Certified Financial Planner Nancy Hite’s cute face superimposed on Sir Lancelot on horseback dubbing her Lady Lancelot whom you definitely would want to have at your financial planning roundtable.
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