Press Release PR

Not too long ago, I was invited to speak to students of Seneca College in Toronto. The students were part of the Corporate Communications program at the college, and part of their studies involved the role of PR and PR agencies in the business world. The talk was very enjoyable, and many of the students stayed behind to talk to me about starting a PR agency, what the job entailed, etc – who knows, perhaps one or more may be my partners later on!

One thing that I was asked was how PR and advertising compared, and indeed if there is a synergy between the two. My answer was “No, I wouldn’t say there’s a synergy apart from the fact that both industries are looking to promote something. They’re two very different industries and the approach of professionals in each one is (or should be) different.” I then went on to explain my reasoning for this.

Before I became involved in PR, if I had been asked the same question I probably wouldn’t have said there was a difference. Yet as my company has grown and I’ve seen firsthand how the two industries work, there is a definite difference between the two. If asked to define, I’d say that whereas the advertising industry can (and often do) use shock tactics to get a client’s message across, a PR agency or individual has to show more restraint.

If a PR agency is doing its job properly, people won’t even be aware there’s a dedicated PR campaign in place. The role of PR is to get as much free publicity as possible, while working within certain standardized restraints – press releases, social media profiling, liaising with the media on behalf of your client, follow-up stories, etc.

Yet because you can only really use a good press release once, you need to make sure that it has impact from the word “Go”, since this will dictate whether your story is picked up by the news outlets or not.

Compare that to advertising, where you can keep the same advert going indefinitely (particularly if you have a large advertising budget), and you can see where the differences start to appear. Additionally, because an ad company pays for advertising space, they know that their product will be featured – not so a PR campaign, where a lot of the success boils down to the expertise and competency of the PR agency.

Although the two industries are often after the same audience, there’s a world of difference between them. This has led to some one-upmanship from agencies and companies in both industries, claiming that “PR is better than advertising” and vice-versa. Personally, I think this is hogwash – each industry has a job to do, and the good companies in them do it well.

I’m also a firm believer that if you can get a strong advertising team working in conjunction with a strong PR team, that will make for one heck of a promotional campaign. With the Internet and social network sites changing how we look at business promotion, I don’t see why the two industries can’t combine, and sooner rather than later.

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