Dudley-Anderson-Yutzy (D-A-Y) was a public relations firm established by Pendleton Dudley, purportedly at the suggestion of Ivy Lee.^[1][2]

History

Founded in New York City in 1909 and originally named Pendleton Dudley and Associates, Dudley's company's masthead was changed to Dudley-Anderson-Yutzy in 1946 after Thomas D. Yutzy and George Anderson joined as partners.

During the late 1960s Dudley, Anderson and Yutzy died, creating a leadership vacuum at the firm. In 1970, in the wake of declining business fortunes, sisters Barbara Hunter and Jean Schoonover bought the company.^[3][4] The two had been employed at the firm since shortly after World War II. During Hunter and Schoonover's first month of ownership, they discovered that male account executives at D-A-Y were being paid at the rate of $25,000 per year, while females had a base salary of $18,000.^[5]

In 1983 Hunter and Schoonover sold D-A-Y to Ogilvy & Mather. At the time of the firm's acquisition it was considered the world's oldest continually operating public relations firm.^[6] Ogilvy & Mather continued to operate D-A-Y as a separate division until 1988.

Explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson was retained by Pendleton Dudley as a celebrity spokesperson to promote meat consumption.

Clients and notable campaigns

D-A-Y was considered a pioneering company in public relations. Among its notable successes was helping to increase the annual consumption of bananas in the U.S. from 17.4 pounds to more than 22 pounds over a ten-year period by highlighting the health benefits of the fruit. It was also credited with the popularization of orange juice in the 1930s as part of a campaign for the Florida Citrus Commission, an effort for which the firm hired Woman's Home Companion writer Marie Teitgen as the D-A-Y "Director of Home Economics."^[7] In 1927, to help promote increased meat consumption, the firm - at the behest of its client the American Meat Institute - financed a two-year all meat and water diet for Vilhjalmur Stefansson.^[8] In 1975 it was tasked with organizing commemorations for the two hundredth anniversary of the capture of Fort Ticonderoga. The celebration of the Brooklyn Bridge centennial - which the firm was retained to organize - was called "the public relations triumph of 1983" by Inc.^[9]

As with many PR agencies of the era, however, D-A-Y's work was not without controversy. Three weeks before the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, Dudley - on behalf of the Protective League of Property Owners - helped organize opposition to the mandatory installation of sprinklers in warehouses.^[10] Later, after World War II, it was revealed Dudley had worked as a middleman to funnel payments made by the Reader's Digest to Lawrence Dennis, an American writer prosecuted by the U.S. government as a pro-Nazi agitator.^[11]

AT&T, which retained D-A-Y in 1909, continued as a client until Dudley's death in 1966. Other clients included Verbatim, Kool-aid and Borden. Tabasco sauce was represented by D-A-Y from the 1920s until it was purchased by Ogilvy in 1983.

References