Can Public Relations and Advertising Coexist in one Department?

By Tom Cronin

Public relations, advertising, events, and sales are all sub-sets of marketing. It is imperative for them to work with each other—in most organizations the marketing head is responsible for all these tools. The key is successful integrated marketing infrastructure. If PR, advertising, events and sales teams work independently, the organization is doomed. It is about delivering one unified message across all channels to meet your business and marketing goals. After all, clients do not just pander to public relations to gain third party credible endorsements. Ultimately, the PR goal is to positively impact the business of the client.

I have found the most effective communications campaigns are those that are highly integrated, both leveraging and enhancing the other. This creates greater impact and maximizes the investment across both. The lines are continuously blurring between PR and marketing now with the continuous evolution of social media, so I believe that it is in the professional communicator’s interest to have a good understanding of both disciplines in order to integrate them in the most efficient ways possible. The

marketing strategies and the talking points for a PR campaign need to be compatible and mutually supportive. If you can get good, positive media coverage, it supports your marketing campaigns since many people in the public trust that the news media will filter out any spin and portray only facts in the news. If the messages match, your marketing becomes much more trusted by your audiences. That’s why it’s important to speak with one voice. You also need to coordinate placing ads, conducting mailings, or posting items on the Internet. The timing of your messages is just as important as the messages you are sending. I have seen ad campaigns kill news stories, and alternatively, I have seen them generate media interest—all based on their timing.

The great strength of PR is reputation management. It has a great influence on sales by creating a good environment for the marketing message to be delivered, while the strength of marketing is more directly linked to sales. The messages delivered by both disciplines need to mesh well to achieve trust in the audience and achieve the final results. Both

disciplines can and must coexist—and their efforts must be coordinated.

The social media environment will bring the two departments together by default as it spans both disciplines. Both PR and marketing are claiming the social media space as their own, in terms of budget and vehicle. In my experience of providing social media analysis solutions to the industry, the winners have been the teams that grasp the opportunity to work together to achieve the client’s goal.

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