Advertising Vs. Public Relations. I guess since the time I have come into Journalism, I have always learned that both of these terms are considered as Paid Media and Earned Media respectively. Advertising means huge budgets whereas PR means the tiny ones. Its been like a love and hate relationship between the two for decades. Now the question is what is more effective? Among two which of these offers better ROI? How can we work with both of them together? Should they work together?
I believe, Advertising has been the big brother in the league of this tenuous relationship. No matter its a massive budget or any other super bowl Ad campaign or maybe thousands of You-tube views, advertising always seems to receive better attention from an organization’s point of view. Public Relations, often works better in the back ground. If you have a certain budget cuts, use PR. Want to hire an intern? Easily shift him or her in the PR team.
But now the things seems to be changing. Google being the dominant player in the search engine industry never aired a single TV ad until last year’s super bowl. Companies now use strategic leaks for their product launches. For the 1st time in 20 years I have seen Pepsi took a back step for the $4M super bowl ad and instead used their $20M into the Pepsi refresh projects all over the world. I mean what was the use of this? Do we call this a beginning or the end of an advertising era?
Of course not. No doubt, Social Media has brought a lot of changes in the advertising industry, no matter old schools likes it or not. Now days advertisers in order to succeed in the competitive world, taking lessons from their PR brethren. I personally believe that a PR person is a better option for using social media instead of any advertising company because its in their ability to maintain and built relationships.
I would like to share some areas where advertising industry can do well if they follow the tracks of Public Relations:
1.) Advertising should be looked as a goal, like a means to an end and not an end itself. It should focus more on views, friends and tweets rather focusing on sales, revenues and market values. An ad campaign is not successful because it had a millions of You-Tube views, it was successful because it led to larger sales and excessive customer loyalty.
2.) Honesty is the best policy in Advertising. I have always noticed that the trust of consumer in advertising is low as compared to PR. When it comes to any company, I can trust anyone, other than you. Just create the boastful and deceptive message for the audience and be honest about your strength and ofcourse your weakness too. Suppose something is going wrong, you should tell me why it is going wrong and what are you doing to improve it. And please never gloss about it and put the blame on someone else.
3.) When you are into advertising, always remember that 50% of 10,000 > 1% of 50,000. In advertising there is no restriction for budgets unlike PR. If you just go and produce an ad and hoping to get 1 or 2% returns because of that ad, then I am sorry, I don’t think these things work anymore. In fact, spend more time in crafting messages that would have direct impact on the audience. .
4.) Being Human. No, I am not talking about Salmaan Khan’s charity house. Corporations will never work on the tunes of new networked conversations.
5.) Bring solutions and not problems. Spending millions and showing to your customer that how fantastic your product or customer service is really out of fashion. I ll give you an example here. Virgin America’s budget is far way less than American Airlines. Yet, Virgin America manages to win in terms of customer service, customer experience and customer satisfaction.
As the years pass by, advertising and PR are bound to work together more and more. Each one of will learn from each other more and more. Without one, the other is incomplete.
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