Blog Post

Advertising and Public Relations

  • By Mark Baker
  • 06 Apr, 2017
Person holds out an apple in one hand and an orange in the other.

Advertising and public relations. They’re pretty much the same, right? Is there a difference? Try to answer the question without Google. I mean, there’s a chance you used it to find this article… um… well, now that you’re here, I’ll just explain.

You shouldn’t feel too bad. Marketing, advertising, and public relations are often mistakenly used interchangeably in everyday conversations, loosely defined as strategies used to increase a company’s brand awareness and generate sales. They’re all related to that idea, but they have distinct differences.  Let me break it down for you. 

Think of marketing as a lovely fruit salad. The fruit salad has various fruit ingredients, similar in their general fruitiness, but different in color, texture, flavor, and nutritional value. In marketing, two important ingredients are advertising and public relations, and one could argue that comparing advertising and public relations is like comparing apples and oranges.

Now, the fruit salad lives in a bowl. In this analogy, the bowl represents the media. Marshall McLuhan wrote legendary research arguing that the medium is the message, meaning that what you have to say and the method by which you’re going to say it are inextricably intertwined. Whether you consume your fruit salad in a bowl, on a plate, with your hands, or through an IV, you transport it through something, and what you choose as that medium affects the overall experience of the fruit salad.

Media—including television, radio, search engines, social media, newspapers, trade shows, snail mail, and even word of mouth—transport the message of your brand to your audience. Both advertising and public relations typically utilize the same avenues of the media, but with different intent and strategy. Advertising jumps into the conversation, and public relations entices the target audience to jump into the conversation themselves. I’ll discuss how you can use the media for both your advertising and your PR efforts as I describe the difference between them.

 

Advertising 

Advertising—the action of calling something to the attention of the public, especially by paid announcements (Merriam-Webster)

Advertising is a paid message tailored to a target audience, and it specifically requires creating appealing audio/visual content. The content communicates to the target audience and the public through media, including taglines, photo shoots, billboards, magazines, TV, and radio spots or even practicing search engine optimization with paid search advertising.

Successful advertising promotes awareness, creates a desire for the product or service, highlights the image of the company (its brand), and encourages action. Advertising is a marketing tactic that strategically targets the people who would want to consume it. That means advertisements are essentially their own offers; your company trades money for the audience’s time and attention, and the audience trades its time and attention for information, justification, or pure entertainment.

Approximately 111.3 million people tuned in to watch the Falcons and the Patriots in the Super Bowl in 2017. The majority of them watched—consciously or subconsciously—the commercials that debuted throughout game time. Aside from $1,000,000 average cost to produce a Super Bowl commercial, advertisers paid about $5,000,000 for 30 seconds of airtime and upwards of another $1,000,000 to market the commercial’s release before the game. Whew, that’s a lot of money, but the Super Bowl’s vast viewership gives power to advertising that can easily make the price worth it. They’re such a phenomenon in America that, for some viewers, the game is just something to watch between commercials.

People enjoy them because great advertisements evoke emotion. You laugh. You cry. You feel something about the advertisement and, by association, the brand. When you create advertisements, it should be a given that you root them in your company’s branding. Brand represents your company’s personality, values, skills, and everything important to your business. Guess what? Those things matter to your customers, too. And that’s where public relations become crucial.

 

Public Relations

Public relations—the business of inducing the public to have understanding for and goodwill toward a person, film, or institution (Merriam-Webster)

Once released, it’s up to the recipient to decide the message’s meaning and worth. When executed properly, a good public relations strategy stretches the brand’s reach and collects loyal followers that match the brand.

Broadly, the public relations field concentrates on the relationship between the company and the public. (It seems self-explanatory now, doesn’t it?) Here at HeavyDuty, we prefer to get specific, so we call these efforts targeted relations. Targeted relations strategies increase favorability for the company and its products on a scale that advertising alone can’t do. So these strategies usually come to fruition behind the scenes. In contrast to advertising, other than production costs, you don’t pay for the spotlight—relations strategies weave themselves into your target’s conversation. Once you’ve aimed and launched your marketing campaign to the right people, ideally, they’ll circulate your message to more of the right people organically. Then, you need to be involved in every touchpoint of that conversation to keep it alive and well.

The 1999 film The Blair Witch Project grossed $248,639,099 during its initial theatrical run, and along the way, it sparked a new trend for the horror genre, on a $60,000 production budget. The film follows three college students filming a documentary about the legendary Blair Witch in the woods of Maryland. To create hype before the film’s release, creators Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez handed out a few clips of the film around US universities, and the students spread them like wildfire. Myrick and Sanchez also published missing persons reports for the main characters, hosted an amateur website about the story, and submitted the piece to film festivals as a documentary. Thus, the creators fueled the horror factor and the intrigue, securing their substantial viewership by convincing their target audience that the events actually happened—and they absolutely, positively did not. But to this day, people still Google “Is the Blair Witch Project real?” The public recognizes The Blair Witch Project not only as a cult classic with an ongoing following, but also as the catalyst for a new trend in horror—found footage. By taking advantage of the media and the chilling, mysterious nature of the product they sold, The Blair Witch Project made its mark on the industry.

You can do the same. Whether you realize it or not, your brand already has an identity, and you have resources at your disposal. Social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram have dramatically strengthened and shortened the communication path between a brand and its customers. A customer can instantly broadcast a company’s brand message, which in turn can spread around the world in moments, at basically no cost. That can work for you or against you, so make it work for you with consistency in your tone, attitude, values—all the things that make up your brand identity. And when you mess up—and you will—be quick to respond with sincere respect. Your real-life friendships require transparency, personal connection, and effort. Your brand’s relationships work the same way.

 

You Need Both

Advertising might seem like PR on steroids, and PR might seem like free advertising. But that’s like saying that an apple is just a red orange—sure, they’re both fruits, but they’re different fruits. You need to push advertising to acquire your audience. You need PR to keep your audience. Advertising and public relations have to partner up to support your marketing as a whole.

Wooden plate of sliced apples, oranges, bananas, strawberries, and kiwis.

Back to the Fruit Salad Thing

“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.”— Peter F. Drucker, founding father of marketing who probably loved fruit salad

I don’t know about you, but I would feel pretty disappointed if I went to Publix and all of their fruit salads contained only apples and oranges. Effective marketing involves understanding the people your brand serves and the marketplace around you. Check back in with us on Geared Up to Market to find out about how you can improve all of your marketing efforts. Together, we can make a killer fruit salad.

In summary:

Marketing—all efforts related to promoting what you have to offer

Advertising—paid content efforts to get your target audience to notice and like you

Public relations—keeping up your appearance with healthy customer relationships

Mark Baker

Mark Baker is a natural artist. Since starting his first business hand painting graphics onto vehicles in high school, Mark gained experience in the entertainment, sports, and retail industries before founding this company in 1993. Honest and pragmatic, Mark knows that anything can be accomplished with a great communication plan and creative thinking. 

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