Ask any advertising “creative” person who the hot agency du jour is, and they will most likely answer Crispin Porter & Bogusky, the irreverent Miami-based firm that brought you the Burger King making a tackle in an NFL game, the Slim Jim “Snagalope” and Volkswagen’s “German Engineering in the House” campaigns.
Leaving aside the relative merits of those campaigns, what CPB’s CEO had to say last week in announcing that his firm had opened a PR division spoke volumes. Here are his words, as reported in the July 16 issue of PR Week:
“In truth, we have probably believed in PR more than advertising in terms of its power in the marketing mix. Everything that we’ve been a part of that has had any element of success has had large collaborations with PR.”
Virtually every major business book on marketing in the past several years has touted the power of PR. The most famous, of course, is the Al and Laura Reis tome The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR. A real sea-change is taking place in the marketing field. Smart marketers – including those with a stake in selling high-priced advertising campaigns – are joining the revolt. Will you get in before it has become a full-scale revolution?
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Part of this change may be driven by a cost comparison with advertising. But, I think marketers are waking up to the fact that PR feels more intimate, more connected and more conversational. Customers don't want to be sold. They want the chance to buy. PR facilitates that better than advertising in many ways.
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