The Public Relations Industry

After studying this chapter, you will be able to:

1. Sketch the development of the public relations industry

2. Analyze the nine areas of the public relations industry

3. Explain how public relations, advertising, and other persuasion activities are coming together to produce integrated marketing communication

4. Discuss concerns that media critics have about the persuasion industries

“Some are born great, some achieve greatness,

and some hire public relations officers.”

-DANIEL J. BOORS TIN HISTQKIAN

In Chapter 15, we defined advertising as explicitly paying for media space or time in order to direct favorable attention to certain goods or services. The first two elements of advertising—paying for space and explicitly advertising—are important to under­score because another persuasion industry—public relations (PR)—has been built on the premise that the best way to influence people through media is not to pay for space and not to announce your presence.

Recent decades have seen the fast growth of a third persuasion business—marketing communication— that mixes aspects of both advertising and public relations. All three activities have major effects on mass media. The aim of this chapter is to explain how and why that is so and to point to the growing number of circumstances in which elements of advertising and PR are mixed.

PR - information, activities, and policies by which corporations and other organizations seek to create attitudes favorable to themselves and their work, and to counter adverse attitudes

Distinguishing Between Public Relations and Advertising

You are probably much less familiar with public relations (PR) than with advertising. In fact, it wouldn't be surprising if you’ve never talked with anyone about a public relations campaign. Most people aren’t aware that many of the media materials they read, hear, or watch are parts of a PR campaign.

That's OK with public relations practitioners. They try very hard to avoid getting public recognition for stories that appear in the press, because they believe that, for their work to be most effective, viewers and readers should not know when TV programs and newspaper articles are influenced by the PR industry. The fact is, though, that a good deal of what we see and hear in both news and entertainment material is initiated by, or filtered through, public relations specialists.

What is Public Relations?

publicity the process of getting people or products mentioned in the news and entertainment media in order to get members of the public interested in them

People sometimes talk about PR narrowly, equating it with publicity. Publicity is the practice of getting people or products mentioned in the news and entertainment media in order to get members of the public interested in them. Although public relations sometimes involves publicity work, it extends beyond it.

The following three examples may suggest the wide territory of the PR world:

• You're the CEO of a large chemical firm, and you're worried that state legislators will pass environmental laws that will harm your company. At the same time, you don’t want the legislators or the people of the state to believe that you want to pollute the environment. You hire a PR firm to help you devise a strategy for dealing with this dilemma.

• You’re the head of investor relations for a large technology firm. You are sure that the firm’s stock is undervalued, but key analysts at major brokerage firms don't seem to agree. You hire a PR firm to help you change that perception.

• As CEO of a pharmaceutical firm, you learn in a late-night phone call that one of your company’s over-the-counter products has allegedly poisoned five people in the Midwestern United States. Although your firm has a crisis management team for emergencies of this type, you turn to a PR firm for further suggestions about how to handle the victims and their families, the press, politicians, and federal regulators.

What do these different scenarios have in common? One expert has put it this way: public relations involves “information, activities, and policies by which corporations and other organizations seek to create attitudes favorable to themselves and their work, and to counter adverse attitudes.''1 That's a neat way of tying the examples together, and it also brings up another important issue: the relationship between public relations and mass media. If you think about the description and the three scenarios for a few moments, you’ll see that they all suggest that public relations activities need not involve the technologies of mass communication. Much of the PR firm’s plans for the state legislators, for example, may involve one-on-one lobbying, which is a straightforward form of interpersonal communication.

Still, in many aspects of their work, public relations practitioners do turn to the mass media—beyond simply getting good publicity for a client. For one thing, they often involve trying to counter negative media impressions of the client that were created by others. For another, media strategies typically fit into a larger PR communication strategy regarding the organization. PR work, for the chemical firm, for example, may have an important mass media component, such as reaching out to reporters in the state capital with stories about the positive role the company is play­ing in the local economy and the care its leaders are taking with the environment.

I fie public relations people might also believe that presenting the company in a good light to the viewing public might, in turn, encourage state politicians to believe that their constituents would applaud new laws that do not harm the firm.

Advertising differs from PR in the mass media in two major ways. First, advertisers pay for the space or time that they receive, whereas public relations practitioners typically do not. Second, advertising clearly states its presence. When you see an ad, you know what it is for, and you often know quite easily who is sponsoring it. A public relations activity, by contrast, typically hides its presence and its sponsor.

What advertising and PR have in common is that they deal in billions of dollars and play profound roles in American mass media. In fact, they are deeply involved in three important trends we have noted in media today: the movement of material across media boundaries, the rise of conglomerates, and the increase in audience segmentation and targeting. Not only do the ad and PR industries themselves reflect these trends, they encourage them in other mass media as well.

The multiplication of media and the growth of the internet and other digital outlets have led to two major developments in the advertising and public relations industries themselves. First, marketers of all types are using advertising and public relations in concert to reach audiences with persuasive messages. Second (and as a result), this concert is being orchestrated by large companies that own not just ad agencies and PR firms, but also “branding" consultancies, polling firms, and other entities that add ingredients to a symphony that goes beyond advertising alone or PR alone but is a mixture of the two for what broadly might be called marketing communication.

At this point you may be asking, “Where did public relations come from and how did it develop separately from advertising?” Not surprisingly, that's the topic of the next section.