Firstly we live in an over-advertised world and when there is so much "advertising noise" all around us. Us being human naturally we tend to drown out virtually all of it and tune in only to that which we are already familiar with or that which we trust because we already know something about. What this means is that the vast majority of advertisements hardly penetrate the human mind and the ad budgets are mostly wasted. Just think for a moment about how many advertising messages you usually get exposed to in a day. From the moment you wake up to the time you go to bed. The ads will not even give you any peace when you want some quiet time reading and writing emails to friends and you will find your email flooded with spam messages all advertising something. Sometimes you will even have the ads popping up in your computer screen, rudely interrupting what you were doing.
In this kind if scenario would you blame anybody for loathing ads and wanting to avoid them at all costs? Yet the sad reality is that many advertisers, even online continue to spew out their ads adding to the noise but hardly making any impact on their sales.
How PR Makes The Difference For Advertising Even Online It should be obvious that in a world where there is so much "advertising noise" advertising tends to become less and less believable and is therefore switched off the minds of most. Thus the only remedy for somebody wanting to break through all this “noise” is to use PR to plant a message in the minds of potential customers and only when your product or service is properly positioned in the minds of your prospects, can you use advertising to drive the message home further.
What this means is that PR is so critical that faced with a choice, it can stand on it’s own and work fairly well without any advertising. But ads can never work on their own and we have many examples of brands that have been built only on PR and with no advertising to prove this. The truth is that advertising in the modern world has little chance of being effective without PR. You will simply be adding “noise” to the already extremely noisy world in terms of advertising messages. That is how terribly important PR is as a marketing tool in this day and age.
Advertising Is Even Less Believable Online The situation is that while advertising is widely unbelievable offline. The situation online is that consumers will not only fail to believe advertising, but they in fact strongly loathe it and usually do everything possible to avoid it. Even going to the extreme of paying good money for software to block ads and SPAM ad emails. This is the reason why junk mail is a mere annoyance but online junk mail in the form of email SPAM can get you jailed in many parts of the world.
Even adequate forms of online advertising like banner advertising will tend to work a lot better when some serious public relations campaign has been carried out in advance and well ahead of the launch of the advertising program.
This is the reason why a famous book on this subject titled; The Fall Of Advertising And The Rise Of PR, continues to generate so much attention. Al and Laura Ries wrote the book that gives dozens of very convincing examples and case studies to prove the demise of advertising as a brand builder and the rise of PR which is unknown and unfamiliar to many marketers. The strong message from the authors of the book is that PR is the nail and advertising is the hammer. What this means is that PR makes your message believable enough so that your advertising message will be credible.
When You Understand The Power Of PR Your Marketing Becomes Easy When you really get to understand the power of PR, your marketing is bound to be revolutionized and will become much more effective.