by krgt

Created on: July 08, 2009

Many promotional terminology gets confused and turned around. Advertising and public relations are interchanged as if they have the same meaning. It is important to understand the differences between these two term to have a successful business. There are positive and negative aspects of both of the terms.

When using advertising, ads are paid for and decided completely by the company. They decide the content, air time, and amount of repeated air time. This is very valuable to the company, because they are completely in control. However, using advertising is expensive and time consuming.

Public relations is a completely different approach. It is completely free and the company doesn't have to create anything. However, the company has no control over the content, because the media writes all the content. The media will write about a product or your company is it interests them. This means that the article can be positive or negative. Companies will have a press release to encourage the media to write about their up coming products or news that they have released. If the media decides to write about your company, it can be much more valuable than advertisements. This is because the company is not bragging about themselves or their product, but it is someone else. This makes it much more believable. Hearing the opinions of others is much more powerful than driving by a billboard or a television commercial.

It is important to remember that public relations can be negative toward your company. It only takes one article against a product to ruin a company's reputation. All a company can do is address any problems that the media has brought up and keep up with press releases.

Advertising doesn't have this problem. Everything that is said in advertisements is controlled by the company. However, people know when they are being advertised to, which tends to make people tune out your company's message. Good advertising does create buzz about a company's product, so the media is more likely to write about a topic that people are aware about. Therefore, advertising is important for encouraging good public relations.

Another important difference between advertising and public relations is the timing. When you are advertising, you control how many times you run an ad according to your budget. Public relations does not offer this luxury. The media is not likely to run an article that they have already wrote about, unless there is recent news that wasn't mentioned before. This is because a company usually only releases one press release for a product. This can be a downfall for the use of public relations, but remember that it is free, more beneficial, and advertising is expensive.

Advertising and public relations are very different, but can server the same purpose. A company wants both to promote their company and products. However, now knowing that the differences, you know that they can easily be negative.

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