NEW YORK (AP) — Daniel J. Edelman, who built one of the world’s top public relations companies and pioneered celebrity endorsements and media tours, has died at age 92.

Edelman is credited with developing many of the methods now standard in the field, after transforming the firm he started more than 60 years ago with two people into a global marketing force with more than 4,500 employees in 66 offices worldwide.

His son Richard Edelman said he died of heart failure on Tuesday at a Chicago hospital.

Richard Edelman, president and CEO of the Edelman firm, said his father was “a marketing and public relations genius, because he really understood that PR could sell brands.”

The firm’s clients include Microsoft, Pfizer, Wal-Mart and Royal Dutch Shell.

Daniel Edelman, a New York City native and Columbia University journalism school graduate, worked as a reporter and editor for newspapers in Poughkeepsie, about 75 miles north. He was drafted into the Army during World War II and first honed his public relations skills analyzing German propaganda as a member of a psychological warfare unit.

“I provided information about what they were claiming, so we could answer it with our own broadcasts,” he later recalled.

After the war, he worked as a news writer for CBS radio in New York.

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