Ads are easy. No doubt about it. You can target people, track clicks, and calculate your spend per click. So, do you really need a PR or a messaging strategy? It depends on if you’re prioritizing long term or short term growth, and if your brand is truly unique.
If your product is barely different from your competition, you may rely more heavily on advertising than others—in this case your ad spend is likely to be quite high. Ads are the cost of being unremarkable, as they say. There’s nothing wrong with that of course, many brands have become highly profitable by undercutting competition, outspending others, or finding margin opportunities.
But if you’re truly unique, have a compelling story, and/or want to focus on long term growth, you should invest in PR and brand building. PR and brand building change public perception, find new customer groups, and lower your ad spend.
Relationships are vital—but undervalued.
First of all, PR is not “press.” It’s a common misconception because it’s sexy to see your name in a major publication. Yes, PR people sell this idea—but it’s lazy. PR (public relations) involves building a strategy to shape how the public relates to you.
Tactics of PR are earned media, but also branded events, video or web content that increase clicks to your site, SEO, building trust in high-value networks, product placements, and building key relationships to build influence among large networks.
Effective PR is about scaling relationships and building a brand over the long term. Most founders or marketers may say they’re focused on the long-term but the data doesn’t bear that out. According to Nielsen data, marketers say they prioritize long-term brand building, but 70% plan to prioritize performance marketing over brand building, and two-thirds of their budget is aimed at short-term efforts like advertising.
PR and brand building are capable of scaling relationships, but it’s easy to forgot how powerful they are.
Founders will quickly react, stating “that’s not fair, they had a connection,” when losing a deal but forget the advantage when it applies to themselves. Deals that close due to their relationships don’t seem to solidify the power of relationships. Janet’s story is a great reminder.
Why founders discount relationships
At a workshop I gave last year, I met Janet. As a new entrepreneur she explained the reasons for her rapid success. It took only a few questions from me to help her realize a truth. One of her high power connections (the person has a global audience) was referring her into some big deals—she hadn’t considered the impact on her business.
This is common. Founders cry foul when relationships work against them, but discount relationships that work for them.
I’m not a psychologist, but my gut tells me entrepreneurs want their success to be tied to their unique idea, not relationships. Therefore, they look for reasons outside of their network or trust they’ve built to explain their success.
Relationships and trust are the most powerful marketing and PR tools you have. And there’s some great news: you can change the “who you know.” As Janet demonstrates, it’s just harder to quantify.
Why ad data doesn’t tell the full story
Founders value what is easily trackable, but just because something is easy to track doesn’t make it better. This is called the McNamara Fallacy, the tendency to assume that something is better, more valid, or more important simply because it can be measured or quantified easily. People who favor easy data tend to ignore qualitative factors that might be just as critical but harder to track.
Robert McNamara, the U.S. Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War, relied heavily on measurable data—like body counts—to assess war success but overlooked the messier, unquantifiable realities like morale or local sentiment. Morale and sentiment may be irrational, but they’ll eat you alive. To make matters worse, you’ll never realize it until later.
According to Nielsen research, only 30% of global marketers measure holistic ROI via marketing mix modeling (MMM). They do not look holistically at ROI via MMM.
Ads vs PR: Concrete Answers
Are ads bad? No. Ads can be incredibly effective when used strategically. They can be precision tools when supported by existing PR efforts. But relying on ads alone is dangerous.
PR has long-term brand value, increases trust in your company, spurs investor interest, and positively impacts search engine and AI findability, making them more favorable to your brand.
You want specifics? Let’s go!
PR is SEO sustainable
Great PR strategies scale relationships through various channels like web search. After exclusively relying on trade shows for new business, one content focused turned to me for brand building and SEO. He was clear he only wanted to maintain search dominance and didn’t expect any sales.
In only 6 months however, we watched a notable increase of customer leads coming through his website. He was shocked so many people actually cared about the educational content they were publishing and within 2 years, their content strategy outpaced trade shows. Today, he’s moved on to greener pastures but the ground work we laid years ago is still paying back on his investment. Today, the new CMO has abandoned his strategy but the leads are still coming by the truckload. But it gets better.
Their competitors are now paying tens of thousands of dollars on ads every year, simply to appear in search engines next to their articles. Their competitors are stuck spending more of their marketing budget annually to maintain what my client gets for free. Nielsen’s 2024 Annual Marketing Report shows 72% of marketers around the globe actually expect their advertising budgets to increase in the year ahead for this very reason.
PR solidifies you into AI search
Go ask Grok or ChatGPT a question and you’ll notice the tools source their claims now. Passive searchers in a bar seeking to prove someone wrong obviously won’t click the source links—they were never customers to begin with—but folks looking for a specific product or service absolutely will.
In the future organic traffic to your website will likely decrease as searchers get information they want without having to visit web pages. Quantity will decrease, and the only way quality visitors increase is by maintaining a digital image via digital PR efforts. Getting featured in interviews, writing contributed content, being interviewed, etc., maintain brand awareness.
PR increases brand trust
PR can increase credibility and trust overnight. Literally. One client called me exasperated no one would return his calls—he was a nobody and he knew it. Over the course of 6 months we built his profile, polished his image, and worked on a strategy to provide incredible value to journalists his clients would see as influential.
In under 1 year, he was asked to come to New York City for an interview on Bloomberg. Although it wasn’t his best showing and he stumbled on the interview, the results were impressive. Searches for his name led website inbound web traffic, and suddenly his calls were returned. Readers of these publications expect reporters to dig into folks background—if you make it in these publications that comes with a heaping load of trust you can’t buy.
Today, when he reaches out via LinkedIn when he’s heading to various cities, people are eager to meet with him. High profile speakers in his space seek out events his company organizes, requesting to speak alongside him on stage.
Interestingly, he quickly forgot the impact some of his press wins had on his reputation to the point he became frustrated with his own sales staff’s inability to easily score meetings like him. “I just send cold DMs on LinkedIn when I’m in a new city. It’s not hard to get meetings!” he told me. “For you,” I replied, quickly reminding him he had a solid reputation in his field—his employees did not.
Today, his employees are quickly building their own brands.
PR builds investor trust
Nothing brings investors to the table like a feature in The Wall Street Journal. That’s exactly what happened for a tech client of mine in Boston. After losing several investors, and hitting multiple brick walls everything changed when WSJ wrote about them. The article not only sparked interest among new investors, but investors who previously declined came back to the table.
The CEO sent the article to them, which helped them understand long-term value closing millions in investment.
Investors, like anyone else, have limited bandwidth to filter through their pipeline of deals. Press wins in reputable publications are an indication you’ve been vetted and put under the microscope. If you are “cleared” by a publication a particular investor trusts, trust in your brand increases. Investors also know press can equal brand momentum and credibility to buyers, making you a less risky investment.
PR changes public perception
Most people aren’t aware the way they think about a particular issue is shaped. Spanx Shapewear, Corkcicle, Theragun Massage, Le Creuset, Beats By Dre, Burt’s Bees, Crocs, and Milk Bar Cookies successes hinged on one major shaper of public perception. Oprah.
All of these products found success after Oprah endorsed them. Do you think Oprah is searching coast-to-coast through small towns to find new products? Absolutely not, those product features are the result of PR people and founders working to get her team’s attention. If you think you’re chances of getting Oprah to endorse you are slim, you’re right. Lucky for you, there are millions of channels to change public perception.
Oprah is what I call a trust channel—or the people and networks that surround individuals to inform them of their world. There are millions of others trust channels and your customer is surrounded by hundreds if not thousands of channels that can impact their perception.
Scaling relationships through high-trust PR strategies is the only way to earn your way into those channels. You can spend two million dollars on Facebook or Google Ads and not change public perception or alter it in any meaningful way. But PR people do it every day.
Ads don’t change minds, especially if you have developed a new product. People reject new ideas and new products routinely. They fear what they don’t understand because they’ve been deceived frequently. PR can break through, ads cannot.
PR is your reputation
The way you are perceived and the way culture leaders discuss your brand (or don’t discuss) in public channels is the primary function of PR. PR builds trust in your brand, making customer acquisition more effective and less costly. Trust and brand perception cannot be bought, yet are the most important assets you have.
People are flaky, biased, and highly suspicious of any brands or new information that aren’t presented through networks, people and entities they trust—they rely on their trust channels to validate new information. The way in which your brand is presented, and the words you use, matter.
One past client, Martin Bionics, makes incredible sockets for amputees. Their story is fascinating, but customer acceptance was being hindered by a seemingly innocuous brand message: their brand emphasized “hammock-like” comfort due to the technology’s innovative use of fabric. With that messaging however, customer’s heard “instability,” which made winning trust hard. Our team changed the branding to wording that reflect both fabric-like comfort, breathability, and stability of a running shoe.
The change was embraced by amputees in the fitness community and the company went on to be featured in TIME Magazine’s best 100 tech innovations, Forbes magazine, and eventually a Mr. Beast video with almost 100 million views to date.
PR boosts ad performance
Lastly, PR lowers your ad cost. Your return on ad spend is higher and customer acquisition costs lower when the public has a pre-existing positive perception of your brand. Customers require multiple touch-points, some say between seven to twelve, before a customer acts. PR and in-house content strategies spread your brand story and message wide, earning those touchpoints long before a single ad dollar is spent.
When PR and brand building are paired with targeted advertising, ads can quickly close sales your brand reputation and PR efforts already earned. How effective would an ad be from Martin Bionics when paired with their existing PR wins? Much more effective.
PR is for partnership
Scaling relationships is validation. Validation in various networks your audience trust is a great way to create new partnerships. Partnerships or brand collaborations can be mutually beneficial.
A sleep mask company and a white noise machine can leverage each other’s networks to reach new customers. A fitness company can collaborate with a supplement company, a grocery story can partner with a cooking shop, etc. Brand collaborations happen through effective PR strategies that find partners who share a common audience. Ads can’t buy this kind of access.
***
In the end, it’s not about Advertising VS PR. Both have their functions. Ads can achieve important short term goals, and PR achieves long term sustainable goals.
