Publicity Isn't a Replacement For Advertising

Myth 4: Publicity is Free and Easy

From Guy Bergstrom

Anybody can do public relations, right?

And if I can get stories in the newspaper, on the radio and on television for free, I can chop my advertising budget down by an equivalent number of column inches or 30-second spots.

Expertise Matters

You probably drive a car. And your neighbor, too. That doesn't mean you should hire your neighbor to fix your Chevy's engine. Not when your competition is using a trained mechanic.

And there's a lot of competition with public relations.

Most organizations are trying to get coverage in the media. Most people doing public relations full-time are experienced professionals who used to work at newspapers, TV or radio stations, and the ones who didn't often got degrees in journalism or public relations.

So it's smart to have the best possible person doing the job. Reporters and editors often talk in jargon, and there's all sorts of little rules of etiquette that an outsider wouldn't know.

That doesn't mean somebody like a small business owner can't do a little public relations on the side, themselves. A lot of people do their own PR. It just pays to study and ask questions of people in the business before spending a lot of time trying to do it yourself.

Publicity Isn't a Replacement For Advertising

Think about the race for president of the United State of America.

Nothing gets more press coverage than the race for president. The new president has barely taken office before pundits start speculating on who'll run against him or her.

If this myth had a grain of truth to it, presidential candidates wouldn't spend a dime on advertising.

They're getting insane amounts of ink, right? They're all over the newspapers, television, radio and the internet. Nobody gets more press.

Yet presidential candidates also spend insane amounts of money on campaign ads. TV and radio, direct mail and internet ads. You name it.

That's because earned media and advertising are different animals.

Earned media is more credible. People put more weight behind a story on page 5 of The New York Times than a full-page ad on page 6 of the same newspaper.

Yet you don't control the message with earned media. Reporters and editors write the story.

Advertising is something you can control. And it can be more visceral. Images in a television ad are, some researchers say, more important than the words. Ronald Reagan's press people thought so. They didn't mind bad stories on the nightly news as long as the film showed Reagan looking presidential.

Advertising can also be tracked and tweaked. You can test an ad in one media market while testing a different ad elsewhere. It's possible to edit, reshape or redo ads to make them more effective, and to run them again and again, to reach people who didn't see it the first time.

You can't do that with earned media. Most stories run once. If the audience wasn't watching or listening, too bad.

Advertising also is a more direct ask. You're asking people to buy a product or vote for a candidate -- or whatever your purpose is. Earned media, by nature, isn't a direct ask. It's more educational and informative than persuasive, unless you're doing opeds and letters to the editor on the opinion page.

Publicity and advertising are different tools for different purposes.

Date: 2015-12-18; view: 790