Publicity VS Advertising !

Session by Mr.Nytik Joshi, Senior Manager- Marketing(TTHL), Hexaware Technologies

In this digital era of burgeoning media, clutter and noise, there are numerous vehicles through which one can take the product message to the customers. But, when there are serious limitations in such a scenario, Mr. Nytik particularly took up Al Ries’ law of publicity and the law of advertising during a typical Sunday marathon session at CBS.

The Law of Publicity
“Brands are born with publicity and not with advertisement”

The Law of Advertising
“Once born, a brand needs Advertising”

Advertising is something where you involve sizeable monetary investment in order to promote your product or message. Whereas, Publicity is a commercial exercise in which, strictly speaking, there is no money transaction made. Publicity is something free of cost to promote or take your product to the end users. Also, Publicity is an endorsement through a third party which is far more credible than an exercise that blows the own trumpet.

“Unlike advertising which you can decide when you want to put up an Ad
PR takes time to built up and gain momentum”

Not just one or two, we literally ran through the cases of a plethora of brands that include Botox, Volkswagen, Vespa, Red Bull, Harry Potter, Jet Blue, Linux, Starbucks, Google, Palm and The Body Shop

Mr.Joshi buttressed the point that PR is like an Aeroplane take-off, which involves comparatively low risk and high return, whereas, Advertising is like a rocket’s take-off, which involves high risk and high return. It is always better to use the combination of both PR and advertising. Brands should be given birth in the lap of PR and after a certain stage it should play through Ads. A remarkable case was that of Microsoft XBOX. Microsoft created a huge interest through their buzz even before the launch and they didn’t spend a single penny on advertising before the launch and the newspapers had an article on Nov 1, 2001, which was a part of the publicity exercise.

Few more recent brands which has immensely exploited the publicity route are Cisco, Dell, Oracle, Microsoft, Palm, SAP, Sun Microsystems, Ebay, Google andYahoo

He also took us through the reality about the two sides of a PR coin:
Positive power of the positive PR
Negative power of the negative PR

The important aspects discussed during the session were,

Advertising is self serving, what you say about you has little or no credibility. People trust media, the third party effect.

What makes news? Being 1st in a new category makes news. Not being better than your competitors.

Why PR is important? Being 1st in market is worth nothing. Being 1st in mind is worth everything.

Finally the session was wrapped up with some incredible ideas on new age marketing:

· PR is more powerful than Advertising
· Advertising dollars cannot compensate for the lack of favourable PR
· If you can’t be 1st in a category, create a new category for you
· Most Advertising agencies focus on the wrong concept
· If Advertisement is so powerful why don’t Ad agencies advertise?
· There is a consumer reaction against Ads
· PR should take a lead role in Brand Building
· Many established brands don’t spend more money on brand


PR should focus on the new and different, that’s how brands are built.
Advertisement should focus on the old and familiar, that’s how brands are maintained.

When Chennai was having its first ever marathon, we had this engaging marketing marathon at Chennai Business School. Quite an interesting and charming session for continuous 3 hours, full of interesting examples & cases, we even forgot to have a break in between. Thanks a lot Mr. Nytik.

Contributed by Uma Shankar Pandian, Marketing Varsity