# Herbert Schmertz (1930–2018) **Herbert Schmertz** (March 22, 1930, Yonkers – January 17, 2018, West Palm Beach) was vice president for public affairs at [[Mobil Oil]] from 1969 to 1988 and the principal architect of [[Advocacy Advertising]] — the paid corporate op-ed — and of the argument that a corporation's political speech is speech the First Amendment protects, the argument that became [[Corporate Free Speech]]. The *New York Times* called him perhaps the most visible public-relations executive in America in the 1970s and '80s; *New York* magazine profiled him as "Oil Slick." He is in the vault because the doctrine the Supreme Court adopted in [[First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti]] (1978) and [[Citizens United v. FEC]] (2010) was, for a decade before, a Mobil communications strategy. ## Career A Union College graduate (1952) and Columbia-trained lawyer (1955) who served two years in Army intelligence, Schmertz was a Democrat — an organizer for John F. Kennedy in 1960, a Robert Kennedy campaign aide in 1968, a volunteer for [[Ted Kennedy]] in 1980 who later also worked for [[Bob Dole]] in 1988. He joined Mobil in 1966 as manager of corporate labor relations and became vice president for public affairs in 1969 under CEO [[Rawleigh Warner Jr.]], who gave him the mandate and the budget. ## The program - **The advertorials (1970– ).** Every Thursday from 1970, Mobil bought the lower-right quarter of the [[New York Times]] op-ed page for what Schmertz called "idea advertising": essays on energy policy, regulation, the press and Mobil's critics, later syndicated to other papers. The company answered the 1973 oil shock's hostility not with image ads but with arguments — and with attacks on journalists who covered it. - **"Affinity-of-purpose marketing."** In 1970 WGBH's Stan Calderwood offered Mobil *The Forsyte Saga*; Schmertz saw 39 hours of television for a fraction of the network price and took it. *Masterpiece Theatre* followed in 1971, and the pattern — an oil company as the patron of British costume drama — gave Mobil relationships with the cultural establishment that its politics could not have bought. James Ledbetter's *Made Possible By…* treats it as the origin of corporate underwriting's grip on public broadcasting. - **The fight with the networks.** When CBS and ABC refused to air televised versions of the advertorials as too controversial, Schmertz and Warner mounted a years-long campaign arguing that corporate speech was being suppressed — the framing that migrated into the *Bellotti* litigation the same decade. - **Creative confrontation.** His 1986 book, *Goodbye to the Low Profile: The Art of Creative Confrontation*, set out the method: a corporation should argue in public, name its enemies and never apologize. Reagan named him to the Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy (1983–85). He left Mobil in 1988 to found Schmertz & Co. ## Why he matters Schmertz built the corporate-speech argument as *strategy* before the Court adopted it as *doctrine*. The vault's [[Corporate Free Speech]] page traces the line from his advertorials to *Bellotti* to *Citizens United*, and the [[Advocacy Advertising]] page follows the form into today's issue campaigns; the 2022 climate-litigation defense that deceptive oil advertising is protected speech is the same argument, fifty years on. ## See Also - [[Mobil Oil]] · [[Rawleigh Warner Jr.]] · [[ExxonMobil]] - [[Advocacy Advertising]] · [[Corporate Free Speech]] · [[First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti]] · [[Citizens United v. FEC]] - [[New York Times]] · [[The Climate Denial Machine]]