Differences between marketing, advertising and PR
Great discussion over at Yahoo Small PR Agency Pros
I’ll throw in a little twist here to focus on what a person who works for a living has to do to communicate and accomplish these various and distinctive roles and objectives.
Advertising: paying for the creation and placement of communications so that target audiences of the selected media take the action wanted (which for products and services is usually sales, but for politicians could be votes, or for organizations, could be social action).
Marketing: the creation and management of programs and people and the execution of strategies, tactics and actions to achieve sales and profits of products or services (or votes or social action).
PR: the creation and presentation of proposed content to media (publishers or producers) to persuade them to publish or showcase a story or information that is perceived as objectively reported by their audiences, that creates interest, desire and promotes and triggers desired action (sales, votes or social action).
And btw, if the latter is what you spend a lot of your time doing, my new book Trash Proof News Releases is up on Smashwords – it’s a free download. It’s expressly designed to be an immense help to anyone who even thinks about writing a news release. I basically spend whole chapters of the book trying to explain clarify and communicate the difference between PR, and marketing and advertising, since what I see day in day out is otherwise successful marketing people fail to realize the difference between these distinctive functions, and the different types of MarCom copy required for each.
Book page to download Trash Proof News Releases Smashwords edition:
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/5921
The book can be viewed online or downloaded in ten different formats.
action, advertising, copywriting, marketing, persuasion, pitching, presentations, publicity, targeting media, writng news releases