The Communicator

It’s a rotten time to be in advertising. After a decade of extreme turbulence – mostly precipitated by the runaway popularity of the internet – the recent economic downturn has been a disaster for traditional advertisers. Clients have gone bust, outlets have closed, and advertising budgets have been slashed across the board.

But it’s a great time to be in PR. The internet has steadily amplified the voice of communicators, unlocked entirely new channels and audiences, and pushed down the cost of delivering effective programs. The recent economic downturn has only made PR more valuable as companies deal with the public backlash of excessive bonuses, corporate failures and unprecedented layoffs. For evidence, check out the recent article “Good News”, from The Economist which details how global PR firms are booming.

Now, I’m not jumping on the ‘Death of Advertising’ bandwagon. In many promotional circumstances, there is great value in the judicious use of advertising to support communications initiatives. But where advertising is limited to one or two phases of a brand’s lifecycle – launch and promotion -  public relations goes much further, offering holistic and effective reputation management for every phase of the business cycle. 

It’s not even the advertising industry’s fault. You can thank changing societal trends and technological innovation for altering the fundamentals of: 

• Trust: Recent surveys show that – overwhelmingly – people trust their peers more than companies (not sure that we needed a survey to tell us that, but kudos to the Market Research guys for creating work for themselves in the downturn). In geek-speak, this roughly translates to: B2C + B2B < P2P. While advertising gurus have been struggling to find the winning formula for advertising on social media sites, PR has been busy building trust between consumers and brands through open dialogue and transparency.
• Availability:  Innovation has been giving advertising the cold shoulder. Between PVRs, RSS feeds and news aggregators, people have become quite adept at stripping advertising out of everything they do. Not so for communications messages, which have proliferated and often taken on a life of their own by harnessing peer and social networks. 
• Cost: The diffusion of advertising vehicles and splintering of audiences means that companies need to target an ever-increasing range of outlets and vehicles to get the same benefit from advertising as before. For PR, the incremental cost of adding new outlets, channels and audiences to an existing campaign is negligible to non-existent. 
• Shelf-life: Google search your company. Do you see all your old advertisements? Probably not. But I’m sure you found hundreds of copies of older press releases, puff pieces and news coverage. Ad campaigns die after the budget is gone, but PR tends to live on forever.