Does the advertising industry need better advertising, or PR?
Donaton: The advertising industry hasn’t been very good at advertising itself, or promoting itself. I was speaking to somebody who owns a PR agency who said that he thinks PR agencies are terrible at getting PR for themselves. I think advertising agencies are terrible at advertising themselves. IWM: Why is that? Donaton: They’ll give you various reasons; the most selfless being that they’re in business for their clients, and they shouldn’t be spending time and resources marketing themselves. But if you look back to the 1930’s, ad agencies were big advertisers in places like Fortune magazine. They often advertised the kind of results that their clients got. But, you know, winning new business at agencies is much more complex these days. They still go out with a lot of those results stories, but they try to tell them one-on-one. It’s a very relationship-driven business.
