When Should You Advertise vs. Engage Public Relations?

Sometimes it is hard to tell how to best build awareness and interest in your company.  Should you invest in advertising or public relations?  Or both? You may need some guidance to figure it out.

Advertising and public relations are two complementary channels that can work together to increase purchase intent, but they offer different benefits. When deciding where to invest for your business, it is helpful to understand what each channel can do – and not do.

The Differences Between PR and Advertising

Advertising is a paid medium that helps to raise exposure of a product or service. The advertiser pays for the placement and its appearance in the publication is guaranteed. The advertiser decides the size of the ad, and when and where it will run. The advertiser also has control of the content in the ad (as long as it complies with federal guidelines). In general, this is a more expensive approach, in part due to production costs and in part to the wide audience it has the potential to reach. Consider this – a 2022 Super Bowl ad cost $6.5 million for a 30-second spot – and this didn’t include the cost of creating the ad.

Public relations (PR) is different. PR is a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their key audiences – such as customers, partners, employees and investors, as examples. Simply put, public relations is an ongoing process of building and strengthening relationships. One commonly used public relations strategy is media outreach, which includes approaching reporters on a topic of interest with the goal of securing a news story that features your company or leaders, whereas seeking media coverage is an earned placement (success is not guaranteed). 

PR professionals must pitch an idea and convince a reporter to write or produce a news story. And even if the PR professional successfully convinces the reporter to cover the story idea, the PR professional can’t control the outcome of that article. The reporter chooses what appears in the final article that we see in the news – and when it appears. All the PR professional can do is try to influence it.

The Value of Public Relations vs. Advertising

So why do these differences matter? They play different roles. Advertising raises awareness with an intent to communicate a message of “Buy This” or “Do That.” The message of an ad tends to focus on product features that will motivate the audience to purchase the offering. 

Public relations impacts the purchase decision as well, but in a different way. The PR message tends to focus a spotlight on the value of the product or service. It says, “This is important because it impacts you in a positive way” rather than focus on specific features. Let me give you an example. 

In the spring of 2021, Apple launched its iOS 14.5 update with an advertisement that read, “Privacy. That’s iPhone.” It was a simple and clear campaign. And anyone who saw it knew it was about privacy. The ad raised awareness of the new privacy features of the iOS system. 

But it wasn’t until I read the blogs and articles about the update that I understood why that was important. The update changed privacy controls to allow users to opt out of being tracked by apps. It allowed the phone user to restrict data collection that could be resold and used by advertisers to redirect ads to the user. This new privacy control had significant ramifications for advertisers, like Facebook, who collect data on users and for advertising. It gave consumers the ability to opt out of a practice that was a significant source of revenue for advertisers. 

In this case, the ad alerted iPhone users to app tracking and how to stop it with an iPhone, but the news articles explained why this was important.