Advertising and Public Relations are beginning to see many common skills, practices and applications; and in the near future Advertising and Public Relations professionals bringing the best of both worlds may have a massive edge.
“Advertising is what you pay for, publicity is what you pray for” goes the saying. Nowadays when brands launch a campaign, they do both – pay and pray – for visibility, awareness, interest and actions. Often clients will want their Advertising and Public Relations consultancies to work together. Because in the recent past, some of the biggest and most successful campaign ideas came from PR practice (and were boosted through advertising).
This is especially true for campaigns that are happen frequently (like Flipkart’s Big Billion Sales) and specifically time bound in nature. When a large investment is made (in creating TVCs, buying media slots) it should get public relations talkability around it as well.
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It is in such cases that it is necessary for Advertising and Public Relations professionals to have some familiarity with each others’ practices. The advertising approach, very crudely put, hinges a set of creative messages amplified through 360 degree media investment. At the same time public relations value chains play their role in ensuring that these efforts create stories worthy of being told several times over. This shows great levels of inter-dependencies between these two functions. Seemingly the effectiveness of advertising is magnified through public relations, and public relations thinking can guide advertising strategies. Several brands have executed this flawlessly. An example is TATA Tea’s Jaago Re campaign.
Can you think of any recent ones? Leave a comment or Tweet to us @SCoReInd!
It is a complicated tact to create this symbiotic relationship and to get the best out of it. Clients are usually the focal point of this cooperation. They would steer it with very clear goals of each functions individually and together as a single unit. Clients will also have the prerogative of juggling the complementary capabilities of each.
Naturally any such collaboration begins with mutual familiarity as well. There are instances of clients organising “all-agency” off-site events wherein all or several consultancies under the client – creative, development, media buying, public relations, come together for immense knowledge sharing. This can lead to greater trust and understanding of the collective strengths of the brand ecosystem as well.
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As a campaign rolls out, the functions typically start working more closely. Certain milestones of a campaign may be meticulously timed. Paid, owned and earned media efforts become more coordinated in terms of their timing as well as their messaging. This is also were the success metrics begin to converge to singular goals of recall.
Increasingly however, it is not just goals that are converging, but mechanics of disbursement as well. Social media platforms are where the lines of Advertising and Public Relations begin to blur. Content and conversations in this owned media platform are developed around the principles of PR as well as advertising. In late 2013, Facebook made changes to its reach algorithm such that the content reach hits a ceiling unless the brand page advertises. This made the social media managers, who only specialised in content development through research and writing, to also familiarise themselves to digital advertising. The next leg of this journey could be a state where PR professionals are inherently also digital marketing experts, and reasonably proficient in both kinds of media.
This blog is a part of insights on Public Relations shared by SCoRe. Know more about what we do to spread PR Knowledge, www.scoreindia.org and our Post Graduate Programme in Public Relations
