Ivy Lee

Lee advised major industrial corporations, including steel, automobile, tobacco, meat packing and rubber, as well as public utilities, banks and foreign governments.

Lee pioneered the use of internal magazines to maintain employee morale, as well as management newsletters, stockholder reports and news releases to the media.

It made this partnership after working together in the Democratic Party headquarters, handling publicity for Judge Alton Parker's unsuccessful presidential race against Theodore Roosevelt in 1904.

In the same year, after the 1906 Atlantic City train wreck, Lee issued what is often considered to be the first press release, after persuading the company to disclose information to journalists before they could hear it elsewhere.

[7] His principal competitor in the new public relations industry was Edward Bernays, and he has been credited with influencing Pendleton Dudley to enter the then-nascent field.

Lee warned that the Rockefellers were losing public support due to ordering the massacre of striking workers and their families (and the burning of their homes).

It was necessary for Junior to overcome his shyness, go personally to Colorado to meet with the miners and their families, inspect the conditions of the homes and the factories, attend social events and listen to the grievances (all the while being photographed for press releases).

This was novel advice which attracted widespread media attention, and opened the way to wallpaper over the conflict and present a more humanized version of the wealthy Rockefellers.

In 1926, Lee wrote a famous letter to the president of the US Chamber of Commerce in which he presented a convincing argument for the need to normalize US-Soviet political and economic relations.

Lee is considered to be the father of the modern public relations campaign when, from 1913 to 1914, he successfully lobbied for a railroad rate increase from a reluctant federal government.

[13][14][15] Over his career he also was a public relations advisor to George Westinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, John W. Davis, Otto Kahn and Walter Chrysler.