Where do PR and advertising fall in the Marketing Toolkit? As with everything else these days, they are both evolving, and through Darwinian logic are becoming more assimilated in the Internet Age. Years ago, in the mass market era, marketing was advertising. Then, PR became more popular and split as its own area of specialization replete with PR agencies separate from ad agencies. If there was any early distinction it may have been that PR was for celebrities and advertising for products, but the Tylenol scare of 1986 clearly changed all that. Brand managers learned that PR had a big place to play in their marketing plans and not always just for crisis management.
PR continued to grow in stature as brand managers also learned that an item mentioned in a news article had more credibility than a straight ad. Advertising agencies suddenly needed PR partners on the team. Then, team dynamics changed. Twelve years later, in 2002, advertising guru Al Reis and his daughter Laura Reis went so far as to espouse the death of advertising in their book The Fall of Advertising & The Rise of PR.
Today, I'd venture to say PR is advertising -- almost direct mail advertising. PR now targets specific customers rather than groups of customers. This is best discussed in David Meerman Scott's book The New Rules of Marketing & PR.
Unfortunately, most printing companies never latched on to the potential of PR even in the days when it was a relatively simple science. They never hired staff or affiliated with freelancers with strong writing skills and never felt they had enough news to share with the world. In today's world, where everything is about the latest news (newspaper woes aside), well done press releases now position forward-thinking businesses as experts in their field with news about topics rather than events or staff promotions. It's a way to get a message out to a public increasingly through Twitter, LinkedIn, e-mail messages directly to prospects and current customers, and a tiny little bit of pitching to the media (increasingly trade over mainstream).
I don't know if I'd go so far as to say PR has grown up. More accurately, it's probably experiencing its second childhood -- taking the big boys to the teen playground of modern social media.
~ Rhona Bronson
