If my understanding is correct, PR firms would advertise the brand rather than the product, and that you have to earn their attention — that’s what I am confused about. What do you have to do in order for your brand to be “picked up” by a PR firm, and what significance does it have for your brand?
Edit: Grammar
In: Other
Advertising pays for promotional space of a brand. PR uses tactical and timely hooks that attempt to influence content owners into promoting that brand. There’s an easy media mix called “earned/owned/paid”. PR is earned – you have to “earn” the right to promotion whereas advertising is simply “paid”. “Owned” are properties the brand owns it uses for promotion (like its own website for example).
Advertisement companies, in essence, promote a product or service of a company through use of flashy, eye-catching tactics or persistence. PR Companies, on the other hand, are more about the maintenence and promotion of a company’s reputation, usually more reactionary than advertising.
An advertiser’s job would be essentially booking billboards and commercial time, crafting videos and other content for use of advertisement space, and visible sponsorship, with time spent in consultation on how to increase sales and get word of a product or service out there. A PR rep would be spent taking a company’s current image and improving it in the public eye through volunteering, philanthropy, and on larger scales interviews and public appearances and indirect sponsorship.
A hundred years ago when I studied marketing the professor gave as an ELI5 explanation. Advertising is exposure paid for and is controlled by the company. PR is exposure that is not paid for and is controlled by the medium.
If I buy billboard space that’s advertising. If I get my picture in the newspaper handing over a check to a charity that’s PR.
Latest Answers