What is the difference between advertising and public relations?

Public relations is a business tool that often gets confused with marketing and advertising; they are related but are very distinct activities!

5 key differences

between advertising and PR

Price

The difference in cost is fundamental. Advertising is paid; PR is free. In advertising, money buys you more media space and airtime. In PR, creative thinking wins you media space and airtime. When your press release prompts a newspaper to write an article about your company, you don’t pay for that coverage. Compared to the expensive ad campaigns, PR is quite a bargain.

Repetition

The same advertisement can be repeated as many times as you want in a given publication; you can see it night after night. With PR, a media source runs a given press release or covers a publicity event only once. You have to provide a new story or different angle for the media in order to get covered again.

Control

When you advertise, you have almost total control over the layout, timing, content of your message and your material appears exactly as you created it. When it comes to PR, on the other hand, you have almost no control over them as it appears in the media. Your material may appear verbatim in one magazine but may be rewritten almost beyond recognition in another. That is, a journal may write a cover story based on your material; another may not publish it at all.

Credibility 

Many consumers are skeptical of advertising and know that an ad is an ad. Whereas, they believe that if the newspaper printed it, it must be true. They don’t identify it as promotion and are, therefore, not skeptical of it; indeed, they’re more inclined to believe it. That’s because it is in a way, “endorsed” by the media.

Attractiveness

An ad tends to appeal to only one audience: the sales prospects. As a result, they don’t care of interest of the media because they run it in exchange for a given amount of money by contract. Publicity, however, has an angle that is a hook or theme that grabs an editor’s attention in order to be chosen. Therefore, it must appeal to editors as well as the consumers, which sets it apart from advertising.