Kiran Khalap
Co-founder, Chlorophyll
When confronted by the question "Is advertising effective or PR?" I am reminded of a tribe of travelling teachers in 5th century Greece called the Sophists.
The Sophists believed there was no absolute truth and any side of two opposing arguments could be successfully argued. So my answer is, both advertising and PR are equally effective... and equally ineffective! As the phrase goes, "Conditions apply."
Condition one: The desire to find out if either of them is effective. Is measurement possible in the first place? "Yes", however complex the task.
Is it desirable? That only the advertiser can decide! In India ( and elsewhere) there are still advertisers who trust what they do more than what they achieve: activity rather than its effect; rushing around in circles without knowing where you want to reach.
Advertisers spend an enormous number of hours, money and energy choosing between advertising (or PR) agencies. This is followed by investment in negotiating fees with the chosen agency with the help of complex formulae, in arguing about creative content, in choosing the right "director" for their TVCs, in beating down media prices, in questioning costs of outdoor signages... in everything except the effect of all this investment!
Condition two: Measuring effectiveness of intermediate measures only. Advertising and PR are tools for achieving business objectives.
And business objectives are not just about sales, they are about profitability today and tomorrow. But once an advertiser or corpcomm chief is immersed in his day-to-day tasks, she or he often loses sight of this simple fact.
It is the same with PR. What use is measuring column centimetres devoted to your organisation if all of it was negative? What did the corporation want to achieve through its PR efforts in the first place?
Condition three: Not realising that in the 21st century the most powerful media are owned by consumers...not by businessmen
In countries like Hungary and Peru, SMS changed the future of politics. Who controls SMS messages? Powerful corporations like Nike, Starbucks and Shell have discovered that a lone man on the Internet can reveal a simple fact about them and start a chain reaction in entire nations. Who controls the Internet? Closer home, Cadbury's and Coke lost market share and goodwill due to media stories that came from unexpected sources. Who can control non-traditional competitors?
So we reach a new insight: In today's Information Age, all brands are corporate brands. The old division of advertising is for products and services, while PR is for corporations is no longer valid.
An advertiser may spend millions on his brand, only to discover that the corporate image has destroyed goodwill for his product. Thus, what advertising created, lack of PR destroyed. In that sense, both advertising and PR are necessary.
There are various claims to the quote, "I know 50 per cent of my advertising money is wasted, I only wish I knew which 50 per cent." Some attribute it to Lord Leverhulme, some to John Wanamaker. Today, the truth is, when an advertiser or corporate communication expert does not bother to invest in measuring, all 100 per cent of the investment in both advertising and PR is a waste. Any Sophist can prove that.
Prema Sagar
Principal and founder, Genesis Public Relations
The real issue is not about what works better, public relations or advertising. In fact, I don't believe that advertising and public relations are in conflict at all. They are complementary. Communications is the most powerful tool in an organisation and advertising and public relations are both two sides of the same coin. Both are channels of communication as is direct mail, events, promotion and so on.
Together, they facilitate the comprehensive integration of a company's communication strategy. At the same time, it is also clear that public relations precedes advertising as a tool in an integrated communication programme.
Public relations caters to all the stakeholder groups of an organisation, including employees, customers, partners, investors, influencers, government and the community at large.
Advertising, on the other hand, is necessarily a mass-media tool. It is, therefore, usually not viable for a company to customise its messaging to specific target audiences through advertising.
Public relations helps generate trust and impact public opinion by facilitating independent endorsement of the message "" be it through media or direct outreach to target audiences.
Then, there is the question of managing a change or a crisis. And the importance of public relations is well known at such a time. But at the same time, public relations also needs to be viewed from a long-term perspective because it is central in building corporate or brand reputation capital.
Take a start-up company. It first needs to establish a presence through awareness and foster credibility, so that people believe in the value of its products or services.
Public relations helps build this credibility. Just as several companies take the route of the "big splash", there are many today that opt for building their reputation brick by brick through public relations.
That is, building their reputation with small but steady moves forward, communicating their actions through a well-thought-out public relations programme.
It is also important that public relations is not perceived as a stop-and-go activity. It is, in fact, an ongoing exercise, a channel to facilitate a continuous flow of information to all the stakeholders of any organisation. Reputation was never built in a day, although it can be demolished in one!
Of course, it is my belief that public relations stands on the twin pillars of "transparency" and "accessibility". A public relations consultant has to be adept not only at crisis communication, but also in making clients crisis-ready.
This helps tide over potential crises with minimum damage to reputation. Thus, because of its ability to generate independent endorsement, public relations definitely has an edge over advertising, which is a one-sided view in such situations.
Having said that, let me add that at times public relations practitioners themselves use advertising as a communication tool in a crisis, particularly in situations that relate to correcting myths by placing the facts on the table.
Dilip Cherian
Consulting partner, Perfect Relations
The easy way out is to try and insist there is a kind of substitution between public relations and advertising. For smart corporations, it's rarely the question of choosing between one and the other.
Most of the time, the real debate within a company in marketing terms is to see what break-up of the budget makes sense in terms of the end objective of the company, which inevitably is to make more profits. In that context, PR is increasingly getting a larger slice of the pie, and that is why the debate is gaining volume.
In India, some 10 years ago, corporations used to work with a 95/5 rule "" 95 per cent of the marketing budget went to advertising and 5 per cent to what was at that time called below-the-line activity.
Today, we are moving towards a 90/10 situation, where companies that are forward-oriented are looking at signing 10 per cent of their marketing or communication spend on PR. The 5 per cent jump may seem small, but in real terms it's big, because communication budgets across companies have also increased and the number of companies in the game have also increased.
What are the reasons for the change? First, companies have become smarter; second, consumers have become smarter. Third, markets have become more complex.
And fourth, PR has got better. Of course, you still have to spend on advertising: let's not forget that PR only reaches a certain kind of customer "" those who access certain kinds of media and have the ability to recognise the message that the media is sending them.
On the other hand, customers nowadays have become more discerning. Whether it is for a car, a shaving cream or a condom, they are being shown virtually the same ad: scantily- clad women, music music and a tagline "" often, customers cannot recognise the product or else, cannot distinguish between the product and the advertising.
So, at one level, customers are being badgered and bombarded and, at another level, they are becoming cynical about advertising. In fact, I would say the customer is becoming more "miscriminating" "" he sees advertising as a means of hounding him towards a purchase, and therefore, tends to distrust some of those messages.
Because the sense of trust is dwindling "" it hasn't vanished and hopefully never will "" companies need smarter methods of convincing the smarter set of customers. That is where PR has stepped in. It helps companies reach out to customers that otherwise can't be reached by conventional media methods.
But PR can only work for certain kinds of messages about a product. For instance, that a product is being launched; that a product is of a certain quality; or to tell a customer that a product has a new widget or twist in the tale.
PR cannot replace or supplant advertising. What PR does is create an ambience where the same advertising gets more effective; and what advertising does is create the ambience for interest in the product, which is then fed by clever PR.
Also, PR is not just about marketing products. It's also about selling the idea of a corporation. CEOs are now recognising that corporate shareholder values or corporate bottomlines are in the end dependent on what affects extremely influential people within any environmental paradigm. Those power loci are only targeted if you have effective, long-term strategies on PR.
M G Parameswaran
Executive director & member of management board, FCB-Ulka Advertising
There has been a lot of debate in the Western media, and two bestselling books have proclaimed that advertising, as we know it, is dead. My humble submission is that, like the proverbial King of England, advertising is reborn the minute it is pronounced dead.
It was a copywriter, Joseph E Kennedy, who proclaimed in the 1930s that "advertising is salesmanship in print". Today, print is not the biggest form of advertising. Radio waves first took on the role of selling. Then came television. And then the Internet.
Who knows what's next? But one thing we can be sure of is that as long as products and services have to be sold, they will need the support of advertising, because as Fairfax Cone (founder of Foote, Cone & Belding) once said, "Advertising is the business of telling someone something that should be important to him. It is a substitute for talking to someone."
Public relations or publicity through unpaid media cannot offer the marketer the flexibility of repeating a message, because editorial guidelines insist on the newsiness of stories. Buzz marketing and all other new buzzwords can also give a brand just the initial word-of-mouth. How do you then sell the brand to the uninformed millions?
Advertising is taking on many interesting forms and these keep changing as new media opportunities emerge. Let us look at a few trends: In the US, 40 per cent of new car buyers visited car websites before finalising their purchase; in India, progressive car marketers are providing dealers information via SMS; BMW commissioned top directors like Ang Lee to make short films, not to be aired on TV or TV or the big screen, but to be hosted on its website; and Levi Strauss used the in-house TV channel of retail chain Wal-Mart to advertise its "Signature" range through specially-commissioned TV commercials.
The examples can go on. As new hurdles come up, new opportunities for advertising open up. Fortunately for some of us who have spent most of our working life in advertising, little has changed. We still write the same briefs about brands.
We still look for the hidden truth in the brand that will help it stand apart from the competition. We still attempt to mine consumer minds for that elusive "insight".
And we are still spending a large part of our working hours looking for ideas that will make the brand promise take shape and fly into consumer consciousness. So while everything has changed, nothing has really changed.
Advertising will continue as long as business enterprises continue to look for customers to sell their wares. We may not recognise it, we may not define it the old way, but advertising will live on. So it may be apt to say "Advertising is dead. Long live advertising."
