Public Relations Increasingly Edging Out Advertising
A shifting media landscape helps accelerate PR as more cost-effective marketing tool
For evidence that the world is changing perhaps faster than ever, look inside the world's largest consumer-products company, Procter & Gamble (P&G).
Marketers pay a lot of attention to P&G because, after all, it spends $4 billion each year on marketing communications. Indeed, P&G is credited with having invented the soap opera some half-century ago as a way to sell laundry detergent. So when P&G sneezes, a lot of advertising, marketing and PR professionals reach for their Kleenex.
In a recent study, P&G found that the return was often better from a PR campaign than from traditional forms of advertising. Probably the principal reason is the relatively far lower cost of PR: for P&G, it can represent as little as 1 percent of a brand's marketing budget.
Spending on PR has been on the rise in the 21st century, approaching $4 billion a year. It's easy to see why.
In most larger American cities, the cost of an effective advertising campaign is usually well into the high five figures for a duration of three to six weeks – and that's advertising only on one or two media such as radio and TV.
And who remembers a single ad? For this reason, you need three or four such campaigns per year to reach the target market effectively. For that, expect to spend $200,000 to $500,000 annually.
An ongoing PR program almost always costs a fraction of advertising and usually has many times more impact. Public relations typically generate five to ten times as much exposure as it costs. So if you spend $15,000 on a PR campaign, it's common to get the same exposure that you'd have to spend $75,000 to $150,000 to get by advertising.
Meanwhile, media is increasingly fragmented by the continued expansion of the Web, cable television, satellite radio, podcasts and vodcasts (video on demand on the Web). One consequence is that original content is in even higher demand. Thus, as the Internet becomes awash in blogs, well-written news and consumer information grows more valuable in branding a company and its products and/or services.
