Cherry Huong

Public Relations (PR) and Advertising have been regarded as the two best choices for the young to showcase their talents. In these fields, the young have chances to utilize their creativity; activeness and tact. Both PR and advertising require mass communication skill, which make it easy to confuse these two fields. In fact, although PR is somewhat similar to Advertising in the purpose to promote a company’s image, PR is significantly different from Advertising in regard to their characteristics like popularizing methods, expenses and functions.

PR can be compared to advertising in that their purpose is to promote the business of a company. PR sets up a good relationship between the company and its customers by organizing special events such as press conferences, sponsor programs, exhibitions, etc … The purpose rationale behind these tasks is to gain a better understanding of the public and instill in them. In other words, PR makes the company’s brand name well-known with a view to developing its business. Similarly, advertising launches the company’s products by using different methods such as well-organized campaigns, large-scale advertisements, attractive sales programs, etc … These tactics aim to attract the customers’ attention and publicize the company’s image. They both also utilize mass communication as the chief way to release their messages to customers – through public media.

Not only PR but also advertising are two modules of a marketing chain which help promote the company’s commercial goods or services. They cooperate with each other to make the company regularly appear on television, newspapers, magazines, radios, or other types of media. PR organizes significant events while advertising thinks about creative advertisements to deliver the company’s image effectively.

Another feature between PR and Advertising is the personnel, which is usually staffed by young, energetic individuals who are able to work independently under pressure.

Inspite of the above similarities, PR and Advertising have some noticeable differences.

Firstly, the ways these two jobs popularize the company are quite unlike. Some expert said: “Advertising is the man who talks about himself and PR is the woman who has a man praise her”. Advertising directly tells people “Who I am” while PR indirectly uses “the third person” introducing “Who PR is”. One advertisement can be shown many times on different mediums depending on advertisers. On the contrary, PR spreads the company’s information in the form of short articles. However, PR officers cannot decide whether the editorial staff prints the article or not. Their mere task is to write “news releases” (giving information about the company to the press) and then wait for the decision of the press. Furthermore, these news releases are not allowed to appear more than once on a magazine or newspaper.

Secondly, the cost incurred by advertising is much greater than that by PR. A company spends a large amount of money creating advertisements, short videos, slogans, campaigns, and so forth. One recent research pointed out that the annual expense of advertising in the United States is $244 billion, which reaches 2,5% GDP. In other countries such as Hong Kong, Hungary, Sec ... advertising even costs greater than the United States (Al Ries & Laura Ries). Meanwhile, PR costs very little. PR, spending most money on special events attracting the public like sponsor programs, exhibitions; meetings, and the like, adding fame to the company. In another research, a company was shown to spend only $20 billion popularizing new products and $15 billion on different events. In general, the cost of PR is about one in ten compared to that of advertising (www.bwportal.com).

Finally, the most noticeable feature between PR and advertising lies in their function. According to Al Ries, an expert on mass communication, the main mission of PR is to establish a brand name and advertising maintains it. Advertising keeps the company’s image in the customers’ mind by regularly showing advertisements through public media. The brand name repeated again and again makes the customers remember that company better. However, it is not really such a strong tool to establish or revise a brand name when the company gets into trouble. PR tabulates public attitudes by executing a program of action to earn public acceptance. Therefore, PR leads the public to put their trust in the company first so that even when the company is under trouble, the public will still sympathize with it. Advertising could not do this.

To sum up, although PR and advertising bear some similarities in their purpose, marketing involvement and personnel, they are two different fields. They differ in their way of communication to the public, the expense and the function. In recent years, the market has been opening a new prospect for these two jobs to absorb thousands of creative and active young people. Vietnamese young people are more and more familiar with PR and advertising. In the near future, they may not find it hard to distinguish these jobs and have relevant choices for their careers.