To get the most out of PR, you need to know what PR can help you accomplish and what it can’t. A question many of our clients ask is when they should use PR as opposed to advertising. Both play a significant role in the marketing mix; the trick is to know when to use each.
While companies are starting to invest more heavily in PR, they are still spending a much larger chunk of their marketing budgets on advertising. The $4.5 billion U.S. organizations spend annually on PR is just a drop in the bucket compared to the total $775 billion spent on overall marketing communications. Spending a lot of money on ads made sense during a time when most people watched prime-time television and read their local newspaper. But with fewer people watching TV and the circulation of many newspapers and magazines declining, advertising is becoming a less effective medium.
The media landscape is becoming far more fragmented than it once was, with people getting their news and information from a much broader range of sources. As a result, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to reach large numbers of consumers through advertising. As Al and Laura Ries write in their book The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR, “Yesterday it was advertising. Today it’s PR. . . .In the future clients will be looking to public relations firms to help them set the strategic directions for brands, and advertising will be forced to follow the lead of PR.”
As a general rule of thumb, PR is the best tool for introducing a new product or service, expanding your customer base, or shifting public perceptions. Advertising, on the other hand, is the most effective tool for reinforcing a brand once it becomes well-known and the opportunities for publicity start to dwindle. You reinforce ideas that are already there. Our message is that after a while there is no publicity potential in a new brand. People wrote up Red Bull, but today? Now they have to shift to advertising to maintain the brand. Same thing with powerful brands like Coca-Cola. You’re just not going to get much publicity.
Excerpt from Strategic Public Relations, written by Jennifer Gehrt & Colleen Moffitt with Andrea Carlos