From PR agencies to authors of marketing books: many experts have shared their thoughts on the value of PR. To convince you once more to start working with PR: here are six experts on the value of PR.
1: The Rise of PR (and the End of Advertising)
Al Ries and his daughter/business partner Laura Ries work for many Fortune 500 companies. They not only wrote the book The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, but also the book The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR. This book was a Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek bestseller. From this book I quote:
- Advertisements lack credibility. That is a crucial ingredient for building a brand. Only PR can provide that credibility;
- The steady building of a brand through PR is more sustainable than the big bang approach of advertisements;
- Advertisements are useful for only one thing: ensuring that a brand remains known after it is established via PR.
2: Bill Gates and Richard Branson
Gates: “If I had one more dollar, I would spend them both on PR.”
Branson: “Publicity is absolutely crucial. A good PR story is infinitely more effective than a front-page advertisement.”
3: The Era of Earned Media (that's PR)
Jacqueline Bosselaar is the founder of the PR agency (what’s in a name). During an Adformatie event, she pointed out that we are living in an earned-first era: a time when PR is leading. Moreover, more and more campaigns that score advertising awards are leaning on PR.
Media are becoming increasingly important because there is so much information, there is a lot of fake news on social media, and we want to break out of algorithms to access all the news. Therefore, people are looking for sources they trust. In short, news media are becoming more important – and that's why it is more important than ever to focus on a good relationship with the press.
4: Confessions of a Media Manipulator
Ryan Holiday wrote the most thrilling and best book on PR: Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator. In it, he describes how he creates commotion, uses fake news to make clients more famous, and why media (thanks to the power of blogs and social media algorithms) are breaking down.
“I’ve worked with too many artists, entrepreneurs, and authors—whose crushingly rude awakening came on launch day—to say otherwise. Great books won’t sell a million copies by accident, start-ups don't see hockey stick growth by chance, big ideas rarely become a sensation at random. Doing “good stuff” isn’t enough in an attention economy. Getting people to care about what you’ve done is an exhausting and bitter fight for the world’s most precious resource: people’s time. To capture it, you must be a skilled and fluid marketer who can create or spot opportunities to leverage. As part of that, you must create the conversations you want people to have about your brand. If you want to be sure you’re in the news, you create the news.”
5: Credibility in an Image
