I’ve grown increasingly obsessed with the convergence of advertising and public relations, driven mostly by the realization that social media amounts to a powerful new crowd-sourced form of PR for brands to harness and utilize.  As Public Relations grows ever more powerful through social media and other forms of empowered and viral word of mouth, advertising agencies need to recognize it’s influence and integrate the discipline more fully in service of brands.

But we can take lessons from more than just what PR does for brands; we can learn from how PR sells itself.  In many ways, they far outpace this industry.  For too many years, ad agencies have operated under the assumption that our worth was self-evident, that our value was well-recognized and understood.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case.  At least, not anymore. In a time of free media platforms, of unpaid brand ambassadors and most critically, radically empowered procurement departments, faith in the returns on advertising investments is no longer a given.  As a sales profession, we’ve done a lousy job of addressing this growing skepticism.  We’ve allowed the same people who could quickly enumerate the quality differences between a Mercedes and a Kia to apply uniform pricing to creative product which is every bit as variable.  And we’ve not compellingly refuted the growing notion that empowered consumers can handle advertising themselves, despite five years of high profile yet uniformly crappy Doritos ads in the Super Bowl.  For a sales based business, we’ve simply not sold ourselves well.

And yet PR agencies do that regularly through one of their most fundamental practices.  Every year–and often every quarter, they present a summary book or DVD that lists all the mentions their brands have earned, all the stories generated and media insertions to their clients.  These simple documents make their product tangible and real.

Ad agencies need to adopt this practice.  We are very good at listing what awards various projects may have won, but we’re far less facile at quantifying their market impact, at describing the ways they changed the conversation among consumers.

As skepticism around our industry rises, we need to tackle this issue head on.  We need to sell ourselves.

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By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Element 79

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