"PR vs. Advertisers: Can't We All Just Get Along?"

Last Thursday, I was on a panel at a "TurnPRon event on "Communication 2.0 - The Convergence of PR, Advertising, Media and the Consumer". The title question of the evening was "PR vs. Advertisers: Can't We All Just Get Along?". The venue is worth a mention, too. It was on the 47th floor of Times Square Tower at the offices of law firm Brown Rudnick providing a truly gorgeous view on Manhattan. I could almost become a lawyer to work in an office like this :-). Thanks to Diane Katz of ExcitePR for organizing it! I also enjoyed the exchange with an interesting mix of co-panelists. There were Tom Burg (Marketing Director, DoubleClick), Sarah Skerik (VP Distribution Services, PR Newswire), Larry Thomas (COO, Medialink), Bob Fitzgerald (VP Sales and Marketing, BizBash), Jiyan Wei (Product Manager, Vocus) and Miranda Tan (CEO, MyPRGenie). Heidi Cohen (Columnist at ClickZ and President, Riverside Marketing) was the moderator. It turned out to be an interesting evening, even if for different reasons than I had expected.

The panel didn't really discuss much of what the title of the event suggested. We spent most of the time on Heidi's opening questions "What is Web 2.0?" and "How does PR differ from marketing and/or advertising?". All panelists were pretty fluent in social media speak, so there was much agreement on the changes in our industry and that they needed to be addressed. You might expect that from service providers who ultimately hope to sell services in response to the change. After all, most of the panelists fell into this category and some of them made their points eloquently such as PR Newswire's Sarah Skerik. However, even the only potential buyer of these services on the panel, Doubleclick's Tom Burgan, not only concurred, but demanded that PR agencies still had a long way to go embracing the change and going beyond media relations. With so much agreement in the room I felt I needed to remind everyone that Tom is an exceptionally progressive marketing executive and that trends usually take longer to become mainstream than trend scouts would hope. For instance, "blog" was the word of the year 2004. Three years later, approx. 10 % of the Fortune 500 and approx. 19 % of the Inc. 500, the fastest growing companies in the US, have adopted corporate blogs. These are still impressive numbers, but they are certainly much lower than many would have expected during the blog hype. And media relations will continue to be a major part of our business for the foreseeable future.

While the panel didn't address much of the title question of the evening, the audience ended up doing it in a surprising way. It emerged from a part of the room where influential blogger and social media consultant B.L. Ochman was sitting between a couple of people from the advertising industry who obviously were fairly new to the world of social media. First, there was an attendee on B.L.'s left who struggled with the social media concept of transparency and authenticity. He felt his business was about "lying" (his word) in an efficient way, and he wondered how PR could comply with the idea of transparency. If transparency was the maxim, then PR either shouldn't filter what is coming out of an organization or become invisible which would mean that it wouldn't be transparent. From his perspective, it's a really good question. In short, I offered the argument that the role of PR would have to change from being a gatekeeper of corporate information to a facilitator of trusted relationships so as to solve the conflict. I'm not sure that this response helped him much, but it struck me that it obviously didn't occur to the questioner that the transparency maxim also presents a challenge to advertising, at least as long as you see it as the business of lying efficiently.

Next, a woman to B.L.'s right made her entry to the discussion with a statement like this: "Web 2.0 is good for advertising, and I'm in advertising, so I'm all for advertising and against PR." Here you go: can't we all just get along? She didn't provide evidence why Web 2.0 is good for advertising, but, of course, B.L. was quickly coming up with an example why it actually might be pretty bad for advertising: the story of the South African winery Stormhoek. This case is pretty well known in the PR and marketing blogosphere, but it certainly was very pertinent to this situation. Ex-advertising copywriter turned marketing blogger Hugh McLeod has helped this winery to increase their sales fivefold since mid-2006, without any advertising, but engaging with a lot with of bloggers! UPDATE: In case you are interested, B.L. provides more background on the Stormhoek story here.

Unfortunately, the advertising lady wasn't impressed with the example and probably didn't know that B.L. was a blogger, so she went on to share her perceptions of bloggers and blog readers such as "people who read blogs aren't very educated". B.L. wasn't very pleased, and rightly so. By the way, 63.9 m people in the US read blogs. (I reported about this and many other facts on the global adoption of social media as researched by Universal McCann here.)

We can't assume that the attendees of this event were representative of the advertising industry, but the discussion provided enough validation for the question of the evening. I also believe that we still should have other parts of the discussion we didn't have that evening, such as: Do we have to redefine the relationship between advertising and PR? Advertising is the source of life for the media industry. Google already revolutionized the advertising model. With the recent news on Facebook's ad platform and Google's OpenSocial Web initiative the next revolution is on the horizon. What does that mean for advertising and PR? I will write more posts about this and do invite the panelists to continue our conversation here.

Georg Kolb

PS: Just found that Jiyan also shared some thoughts on his blog following the event.

Technorati Tags: TurnPRon, advertising, PR, Public Relations

Comments

[B.L. Ochman]

Thanks so much for telling my point of view in this post.

I do take issue with a couple of things here:
- "All panelists were pretty fluent in social media speak, so there was much agreement on the changes in our industry and that they needed to be addressed."

Ummm, no way! The panelist from Biz Bash, for example, was as clueless about social media as his associate was about who reads blogs.

- Stormhoek... "This case is pretty well known in the PR and marketing blogosphere, but it certainly was very pertinent to this situation."

Again, no way Stormhoek is well-known among most PR & marketing bloggers -- or particularly among the panelists.

And I really, really, really wish it was true that even half of PR people knew Thing One about social media marketing.

[Georg Kolb]

Thanks for dropping by, B.L.!

I think you are a bit harsh on my co-panelist from BizBash, and I certainly had the impression that he wasn’t happy with some of the comments his colleague made.

On the Stormhoek case, I think you’re right that – other than myself – nobody on the panel seemed to know it. I didn’t refer to the panel, though, when I talked about bloggers knowing it. I would still argue that Stormhoek is pretty well known in the blogosphere simply because Hugh McLeod knows many of the influential marketing and PR bloggers and because of the geek dinner concept he used to promote the winery. Technorati counts over 300 references to Stormhoek.

Finally, yes, we need more social media savvy PR people. I didn't contend anything different and we are working on it!

Invisible V. Transparent? Not really.
I am not a PR professional. I produce and sometimes direct commercials and corporate promotional pieces for mid to large size firms. I do not work for an Agency, rather a small privately held media services firm. When I used the word "Lying" about what I do I was trying to illustrate a point about Transparency and truth.
Most times in my projects I am simply given sets of information from which I must craft a new truth or a truth close enough to the old truth but with a new spin on it. In any case what I create is something new and just as true as the old truth or true enough.
It then goes out into the world. And communities of people will either accept it or they won't. They may accept just part of it or they might perceive it in a wholly different way than it was intended. My more aware clients accept this uncertainty of outcome as part of the communication process.
I think that good communication demands space for interpretation and even confusion. This simply has to be accepted. It seems to me that PR professionals need to accept this.
So when I say I lie I mean that I accept that my work communicates a truth whose value is in flux from the time the project is assigned.
To your comment that I may not have accepted that the transparency maxim also poses problems to advertisers I say, yes it poses problems for those idiots that try to hide who and what they are. At no point is any of what I do not presented as exactly what it is: a commercial, a training video, a promo etc. And I would fight like hell if a client tried to hide or misrepresent the nature of their communication with the public or community. In this way I am “Transparent”.

As to “Invisible” I meant you simply let the work go and then you work behind the scenes to guide it to the right audiences. This is where, in my admittedly limited understanding of what PR pros do, that I feel your gang has gone astray. Vanity allows you to believe that you have created a “singular truth” that you own and can then force on the public and some how force them to accept it in your way. Forget about it!

When Stephen Colbert coined the word "Truthiness" he didn't identify something new about truth what he in fact identified was the gray that surrounds and can envelope truth and how we have come to be able to manipulate that gray. When I hear you guys speak of Gatekeepers and Corporate Filters and use terms like "Facilitators of trusted Relationships" my Truthiness radar spikes red-hot. Why is that? “Transparency” from a PR person smacks of truthiness.

The maxim for PR and Advertising alike should simply be “People Are Not Stupid”. Give us a good useful product, a great story, and then leave us alone.

Finally, although I can forcefully defend my points, I am willing to accept that I may be completely wrong about everything I stated here and am open to learning and hearing more. I look fwd to the next event.

Thank you.
Clayton Benn
VP.Media Services
Kipany Productions

[Georg Kolb]

Thanks for your comment, Clayton!
Let me try to briefly address some of your points, if that's possible!
I'm afraid here is not the right place to have an epistemological discussion on what truth is, even if that's a discussion worth having. I'm happy to do that off line, though.
Rather than talking about "truth" and "lies" I'd like to come back to what the panel tried to figure out: Why do we need more transparency and authenticity in today's marketing?
You can ask any consumer in the street, but there are also enough studies showing that the recipients of marketing feel intruded and overloaded with irrelevant stuff. They don't want to be talked to as much, they want to be listened to more and receive more relevant information.
As a result, many marketing recipients simply distrust advertising and PR. And they are increasingly empowered to drown out what they don't like (think TiVo)and tap into other sources they trust more, in particular people like themselves, their peers. For instance, using social media they can find other people who used the same product they are interested in and get their views, e.g. on a review portal.
Rather than looking at a billboard or listening to the trained corporate spokesperson, they want to look behind the controlled and polished machinery of corporate and marketing speak and see the real thing. That's what transparency and authenticity are about. This has nothing to do with a "singular truth". It's actually the opposite. It is about the many facets behind the corporate wall that make a company real, not the single image put up by marketing that suggests that a corporation is nothing but an always happy, true and consistent delivery of the brand promise.
Since you are a video producer, let me try to illustrate it with an example from your field. Think of Microsoft. Many people thought it's the evil empire forcing us all into a bad monopoly. What could you do to change this perception as a video producer? Well, you could create another image video or a commercial showing the bright world of Microsoft and how it is only good for everyone. Would people believe it? Nope. Interestingly, Microsoft actually tried something quite different. They created a video blog called Channel 9 showing people working there in a very informal way on video clips. Looking at them you don't see anything evil or conspirative, just people like you and I, in a very unpolished real way. Today, Channel 9 receives 4.5 m views per month. I think it has done much more for the public perception of Microsoft than anything they have done with traditional image campaigns. Just by being more transparent on what is going on inside this company.
I hope this makes more sense,
Georg