For more than a year, Australia's richest man has been trying to lift his company's profile in the US by taking out full-page ads in The Wall Street Journal. He's really put a personal touch into it. Not only has Anthony Pratt paid for the ads, but we're told he's been writing them himself, occasionally aided by the photographic contributions of his friend Gina Rinehart.
The ads seem to be going well. The latest one, a rehash of a pledge to create 5000 manufacturing jobs in Donald Trump's heartland of the Midwest over the next decade, so tickled the US President he sent Pratt back a signed copy. "Anthony, you are GREAT!", it says, above Trump's distinctive scrawl.
We asked Pratt's office about it after seeing the signed memento on Instagram and discovered it's actually the second time the US President has seen and sent back a signed ad.
Pratt's recycling and packaging company Visy already has more than 7000 employees in the US and it's expanding. Pratt spends a lot of time in the US, having made a wide range of TV appearances (helpfully catalogued on his Instagram feed) as well as recently having become a member of Trump's golf resort Mar-a-Lago. Pratt's job pledge was first made at a May New York event with Trump himself. Rinehart was a guest and took a few snaps featured in the subsequent ad.
As for the signed ads, we couldn't discover what Pratt intended to do with them, but were assured he'd do something special. As one Pratt lieutenant told us: "I bet that's one piece of paper we don't recycle."
