Is There a Difference between Advertising and PR Today?
By: Curtis Hougland
The gap between public relations and advertising is closing fast. The main culprit is again technology, or more accurately, consumer behavior changing in response to it.
The cause of this intersection is two-fold. First, corporate, editorial and user-generated content are blurring together for consumers online. It is less discernible what is paid content and what is non-paid content. Advertising links co-mingle with company links amid personal blog links. The authority of content is becoming less defined to consumers.
Secondly, there is more competition for our attentionthe average New Yorker encounters 3,000 marketing images per day with the number escalating as fast as you can say the phrase “attention data”. Competition from your family, your friends, your teachers, your boss, people you trust, interesting content, useful features, relevant feeds, valuable offers, helpful advice, distractions, companies, advertisers, flashing banners, seductive web sites, strangers, spam, data brokers, interruptions, unsolicited calls, *new* items… Remember, the Internet was not built has not been made for users, but it is dependent on consumers.
And while demand for our attention escalates, attention remains finite-with still only 24 hours in a day and seven days in a week. For the first time, information is not the scarcest commodity; attention is what’s truly valuable to marketers and communicators. Most consumers feel as if they receive too much information. They do not have enough attention to go round.
Amid this greater competition for attention and conglomeration of content, not to mention growth of social networking, marketers and communicators are both seeking ways to create authentic conversations with experts and influencers, the people often most responsible for word-of-mouth - a practice long the domain of PR professionals.
At the same time PR professionals are increasingly being asked to not only promote content, but also publish and produce more content, especially digital content - long the primary domain of advertising professionals (although PR often talks a good game on the subject).
What both have in common is the need to recognize that authenticity is the single most important attribute today in all marketing. Authenticity allows you to converse with the increasingly accessible niche audiences online. Authenticity allows you to converse with and not to consumers. Because of authenticity, brands today have to be different things to different people.
Of course, authenticity is a stretch for both camps. PR professionals are uncomfortable with the need to diversify the message and the spokesperson in its outreach. Take a crisis situation for example; the old PR model is to hold the line - frequency and consistency - with a central spokesperson. Less control in theory, more authenticity and better reception in practice.
Advertisers have to “stop worrying and learn to love the bomb” so to speak. They simply cannot exercise the same control, because they don’t really own the brand in a social, participatory media environment; the consumers own the brand now.
By way of background, PR has lost every battle with advertising it has waged. Budgets speak louder than words apparently. PR lost the battle to be the keeper of the brand. PR lost the battle to build the Web. PR has also been slower to change in the face of the typhoon of the Internet.
However, if our venture at Attention PR is any indication, we are forging common ground between advertising and public relations by combining the skills and attitudes of online marketers with the conversational skills of communicators. By joining with Earthquake Media, we are also able to execute social media campaigns across paid and non-paid media, because they are blurring together anyway. Our partners are equally divided among advertising agencies and large PR agencies, and they both want the same things - authenticity online and positive word-of-mouth.