Advertising is Dead. Long Live Public Relations

But if there is so much advertising how can it be dead? After all we do see advertisements everywhere we look. Advertising is like a painting; a painting is also dead yet today it is more popular then it ever was.

A painting’s ‘death’ does not stand for the death of the painting itself on the contrary it is the death of its purpose as a portrayal of reality following the invention of photography. In a similar way, advertising has lost its purpose as a brand-building instrument and lives on as an art.

If one goes to measure the value of a candle, can we measure it by the value of the light output, in view of the fact that a candle has lost its function as a method of illumination for a room, yet in spite of that, nightly world over millions of candles are burning. No romantic meal is complete without candles on the table; in fact every so often individual candles sell for more then a light bulb even.

However like a painting and the candle, advertising has also lost its purpose and has turned into an art as well. This does not imply that advertising has no value. The value of art lies in the eye of the beholder and as soon as a functional discipline becomes an art, it loses its purpose and consequently its ability to be objectively measured.

Advertising advocates will expressively stand up for their vocation on the foundation of enhancing the equity of a brand or building brand value or creating an emotional bond with customers or motivating the sales force. All of the above is accurate to a particular degree, but it cannot be objectively measured, as adverting has lost its communications function and has become an art.

Creating a brand and defending a brand are two core essentials of any marketing program. Where public relations create the brand, advertising defends it. Advertising no longer has the power to place a new brand name into the psyche, nor does it have any credibility left with the customers, as they have become highly cynical of advertising claims and are prone to discard its messages whenever possible.

Nevertheless it is evident that several products and services have reached their target audiences minds, resulting in becoming successful brands. How have they achieved it? The answer is simple, via public relations and publicity. All current marketing successes have not been advertising successes, but in fact, public relations successes, such as Microsoft, BlackBerry, Intel, Starbucks, and Wal-Mart to name a few.

Starbucks barely spent anything on advertising until recently. Being a brand that makes over a billion is sales they spent hardly a few million on advertising over their first decade in America.

They Body Shop is all about its natural ingredients and when Anita Roderick traveled the word in search of those ingredients, the pursuit resulted in endless publicity, thereby built the Body Shop into a worldwide brand, and all this was possible with virtually no advertising.

Wal-Mart one of the world’s largest retailers, Vioxx, Prozac and Viagra in the pharmaceutical field, Tickle Me Elmo, Beanie Babies and Pokemon in the toy field, and Oracle, Cisco and SAP in the high-technology department, all have grow to be multibillion-dollar brands, and in turn multibillion-dollar organizations with practically no advertising.