Learn directly from the words and writings of Edward Bernays via a new tool from the Museum of Public relations.
“It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance. I’m Edward Bernays, though Eddie works just fine.”
The voice of the father of PR sounds aged but still sharp.
Which is impressive considering Edward Bernays died in 1995 at the age of 103.
However, his collected wisdom has now been brought back to life for practitioners, students and educators to learn from with the help of AI.
The Museum of Public Relations trained the “Ask Eddie” LLM — they call it a “historic persona” — on more than a million words of Bernays’ writing and 10 years of video recordings made in the twilight of his life.
Shelley Spector, CEO and founder of the Museum of PR, conducted those interviews with Bernays. She says hearing his voice again is “eerie” — but also sees a huge potential in making his wisdom widely available to the PR community.
“I have spent multiple days with Bernays, interviewing him, but being able to talk to (the historic persona) now, when he is free to reflect on his life and his campaigns and what he has seen in crises, and representing presidents, and the lack of technology he had at the time, it gives me another opportunity to get to know him all over again in a deeper way,” Spector said.
The project has the blessing of the Bernays family and was built in partnership with Edelman. It’s available for free to all on the homepage of the Museum of PR.
When given a chance to ask “Eddie,” a question, I asked him to discuss how to deal with a fast-paced news cycle.
“The temptation is to chase every headline, but that scatters your influence. Instead, identify the underlying currents. What are people truly anxious about? What do they need to understand?” the persona responded in both voice and text.
“Engineer your communications to address those deeper concerns. Speed matters, yes, but clarity and consistency matter more. If you’re simply responding frantically, you’ve already lost control of the narrative.”
It’s good, timeless advice. Because the Bernays persona is very much a man out of time. As a “closed corpus” LLM, it knows only what is contained in the recordings and writings. It has no knowledge of social media of the very AI that animates it. It is, however, very interested in the concepts when questioners bring them up. Still, its greatest value is in being able to easily search and discuss Bernays’ work, including famous campaigns like “Torches of Freedom.”
Currently, that information only exists in formats like Bernays’ 700-word book “Crystallizing Public Opinion” from 1923, which can be a bit dense for modern audiences.
“Here, it’s all synthesized together,” Spector said. “You can get a much quicker response, much more thoughtful, richer response.”
The persona can look back over the course of his extremely long life with more clarity than a person could, combining events, drawing comparisons and acting as a true resource for people looking to study the art of PR. More personas of giants in the PR field are on the way.
“We call this a ‘living archive,’ and we couldn’t find a better term for it, because we are making our archives come alive,” said Spector.
Allison Carter is editorial director of PR Daily and Ragan.com. Follow her on LinkedIn.
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