PR & Brand Marketing:  Is your advertising and PR in sync?

published 2006

These days, many consumers form their impressions of organisations, brands and products through what they read, hear and see in the editorial and news sections of the media as much as they do through paid advertising in the same media. 

Yet very few organisations really know how each influences consumers, what interaction there is between the two and what the consequences are if advertising is presenting one perspective, while the editorial media is presenting another.

Once advertising was king and most consumers were conditioned to receive messages through this medium. Editorial never stooped to cover commercial matters, which was regarded as giving advertisers a ‘free plug’. Organisations were largely covered in the finance pages which were read by a tiny percentage of the population - not ‘real’ consumers.

Today editorial is much more an equal partner. Media see it as their responsibility to inform and educate - giving huge amounts of space to everything from reviews of products and to coverage of the evolution of industries such as consumer electronics. As well, a large number of Australians are now shareholders, so finance and company news has spilled over into general news.

The result is that consumers are now confronted with a smorgasbord of news, information and content. Some is advertising, other is editorial - but distinguishing between the two is increasingly a challenge.  Perceptions are created and opinions are formed from all of this - but never has it been so unclear as to what has the most potency.

Take telecommunications in Australia today. The participants are spending millions on paid advertising. But the sector, and the companies within it, are subject to constant editorial coverage. 

What impact is this having on consumers trying to make product decisions?  For example, how much (if at all) is Telstra’s advertising devalued as a result of the often negative reporting of Telstra’s actions and attitudes in the editorial sections of the media.

Advertising traditionalists will argue that to counter heavy media editorial coverage, marketers need to spend heavily on ‘controlled messages’ through advertising. PR people will argue that research clearly shows that consumers are heavily influenced by what they read as editorial (and perceive as independent opinions), and that they are distrustful of companies simply telling their own story through advertising.

The bottom-line is that news/editorial coverage is, for many companies, assuming an increasing proportion of what the consumers see, hears or reads about them.

PR will argue that:

• The stance the company takes over public issues;
• Public comments made by the CEO or Managing Director;
• The way products are launched to trade, technical and consumer media; and
• The messages that are given through press releases;

 aggregrate to a level of importance and relevance that rivals that of advertising in the eyes of the end consumer.

Yet many organisations are still running their PR and advertising agencies as separate silos based on the traditional model. 

Questions major consumer marketers, who find themselves in sectors widely covered by the news media, should be asking are:

• Should we be finding out what in today’s total environment is influencing our consumers (ie not just researching the impact of our advertising)?
• Are we coordinating well enough the messaging between advertising and PR?
• Are there ways we can make our PR more effective in delivering product messages (and measuring the degree of success)?
• Are our existing advertising and PR agencies working toward the one common goal with complementary messaging?

This is a paper summarising four research studies conducted in the late 1990’s in the US by AT&T’s Public Relations research department to measure the interaction between news coverage and advertising.

Overall the studies concluded that news coverage can have a substantial impact on consumers, on a par with advertising.  They suggest that news coverage can substantially impact the investment a company makes in various forms of paid marketing communications and that expert management of media relations is critical to protect and leverage this investment.

Interestingly, the studies suggest:

• when there is ‘normal’ news coverage, news and advertising work together, and incremental advertising has a positive impact on attitudes
• in times of widespread and extremely positive news coverage, the incremental positive impact of advertising is much less than in normal times
• in times of widespread and extremely negative news coverage, incremental advertising does not have a positive incremental impact, and may even have a negative effect
• advertising can, and should in some circumstances, be ‘turned up and down’ according to the level of unpaid news coverage