How is public relations different from advertising?
JBLH Communications only handles public relations activities and not advertising or marketing. Since most people don’t understand what public relations is or even the difference between PR and advertising, here’s a quick primer: PR: It’s all about persuasion and credibility • By persuading a reporter to write about your client and their product or company, whether positive or negative, public relations can: o Educate the consumer about your company or product o Shape public opinion o Help sell and help your product or company o Establish you as an expert in your industry o Provide credibility for your service or product • There is no guarantee with PR, but there’s a great chance that if your story is good enough, someone will be interested in writing about it. • PR is a function of marketing and includes media relations, corporate communications, crisis communications, speech writing, and publicity. Advertising: You get what you pay for…it’s that simple • You want to run an ad on the b
A. Public relations and advertising are both very important communication tools for your company. However, they perform two distinct roles. Public relations identifies, establishes and maintains beneficial relationships between your company and the various publics on whom your success depends. It is also considered to be more credible than advertising. On the other hand, advertising is usually a paid, non-personal method of communication and its main goal is to sell your product or service.
Advertising is very different from PR. One key difference is that you always pay for the space and time of an advertisement or commercial. By contrast, editorial coverage generated through PR does not and should not cost any money. The media will pick up and publish the story because they consider it newsworthy, not as a paid advertisement. Another crucial difference is that, in advertising, you have virtually full control over the message. Because you are paying for advertising, the ad or commercial runs your exact text. With PR, the media outlet you are targeting is under no obligation to run the story in any form. If a media outlet does decide to run the story, an editor may rewrite the release or use pertinent information from the release to create the news. In addition, you have no control over when the release will run. All decisions are made by the editor. As you can see, PR is a cost-effective way of getting your story out. Taking the trouble to write effective releases and to
Public relations and advertising play two very different roles. Advertising is the company telling its target audience why the company or its products are desirable. This is done through paid placement of messaging and visuals designed by the company. Advertising is helpful to raise awareness, but is less trusted since it is placed by the company itself. Public relations, on the other hand, is third party verification of what makes a company desirable, making it a more trusted source of information. With public relations, the company nor its representative writes the story, but positions and pitches the story to publications in which it wants a story on the company to be written. Therefore, the company does not have ultimate control over exactly what is written, though it is positioned to be written in a favorable way by the writer. One of the strengths with third party endorsements is that although the story was pitched by a PR representative of the company, it is often thought of to
