Let’s all work together
With PR’s storytelling experience and advertising’s ability to define brands, the two disciplines are best placed to work together says The Hallway’s Louise Pogmore.
The lines between the marketing disciplines used to be very clearly defined: if you paid to insert the brand’s message, it was advertising. If the message was spread via influencers, it was PR.
Increasingly the lines are blurring beyond recognition.
We know the media landscape has shifted and is increasingly fragmented. As communication specialists, it’s our job to ensure we seamlessly connect brands with consumers in the most efficient and effective way possible for our clients.
This shift has enabled advertising agencies to obscure the lines by venturing out of their traditional territory into new disciplines, especially PR.
Similarly, with an increasing focus on content, as referenced at the recent CommsCon conference, PR has been moving into more creative and strategic territories. In my experience, as an industry, it’s more powerful when all the disciplines are working together.
Not in silos.
I believe this shift presents a unique opportunity to create a very powerful and logical connection between traditionally separate disciplines.
Advertising and PR have always been about storytelling to engage consumers, whether that is across paid or earned media. The difference is that advertising agencies are better equipped to define brands and that’s the starting point. Given PR’s earned media and storytelling skills, PR is best suited to consolidate with paid media and sit on the same team as the creative powerhouses of the industry, when the brief first comes through the door.
It’s an exciting time for communications and we should be striving for even more collaboration without the burden of agency boundaries. Where one team creatively and strategically plans how we are going to connect with, and engage, consumers with the best interest of the brand, not the budget, as their primary focus. Successful agencies deliver across multiple media and channels. Shouldn’t they be defined by the creativity of their output rather than the channel-specific label the industry defines them by?
Having spent a large part of my career in very successful PR agencies, I’ve always been passionate about collaboration. The blurring of the lines proves there is an opportunity to take collaboration to the next level. This is the perfect moment for PR and advertising to formally unite as one team and genuinely benefit from each other’s skill sets. When the two forces combine, real magic can happen. Delivering more effective results for clients, executed in a more efficient way.
Louise Pogmore is the head of PR at independent advertising agency The Hallway.
This story first appeared in the weekly edition of Encore available for iPad and Android tablets. Visit encore.com.au for a preview of the app or click below to download.
people buy/watch media for the articles/stories/shows/programmes – not the ads
so the main difference between advertising and PR is that while advertisers are always wondering whether their theories about target, strategy and message were correct, the PR needs to get it right first time in order to appeal to the journo, who is a proxy for the audience
some PR’s aren’t good strategy wankers because they don’t have the luxury to be so when the outcome of their work is so unpredictable – there’s no point tailoring the perfect message and media strategy when you’re relying on a journo to execute it for you
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This only makes sense for those PR agencies whose goal is advertising anyway.
PR is also about communicating interersting stories and useful information to the public. It an be about raising the profile of an individual or explaining the importance of a cause.
A story about a flash mob or a sponsored survey is pure advertising dressed up as news.
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I have contemplated this article as I sit here in my Sinclair lounge rocker with the electrically operated extending foot stool, my back feeling much more relaxed than it has for years, and I agree with those who see PR as discipline apart.
As I sip on my refreshingly different, lightly carbonated Koola Cola, and snack on my low sugar yet blissfully rich chocolate Duple Bar, I am reminded of the constant attempts by advertises to insert commercial interest into unrelated stories, or mere opinion comments.
I will still be pondering this later this evening, as I drift off to heavenly sleep on my chiropractic approved Limbo Mattress, and revel in the enveloping warmth of my goose down Dartington Doona.
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