Advertising, Public Relations, and Propaganda

Advertising, Public Relations, and Propaganda

“What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons.” — Don Draper,

fictional advertising executive from the AMC series Mad Men

Advertising is a relatively straightforward process, right? Companies develop brands and

specific products they want to sell. They need to make consumers aware of their brands,

products and those products’ features, so they develop creative campaigns to promote them and

often pay ad agencies to do the creative work and place the ads in front of mass audiences. The

basic definition of advertising is a message or group of messages designed with three

who have been so successfully persuaded to purchase and enjoy a product that they try to

persuade others to buy it too extend the reach of advertising potentially exponentially. A

company is a business entity that produces several types of product, whereas a brand is a term

used to label a specific product or a limited family of products. It is important to differentiate

between the two. For example, PepsiCo owns the Pepsi brand but also Frito Lay, Gatorade and

Quaker, among others. Under the Pepsi brand, there are several products such as Diet Pepsi,

Pepsi Wild Cherry and many other variations around the world. Advertising most often focuses

on brands and products rather than the companies and large corporations that own them. As

this chapter progresses, it defines the core concept of advertising in more depth. Then, it

discusses the history of advertising. It defines two general strategies or approaches known as

to help sell products by raising awareness and pushing people to make actual purchase

decisions, but in the network society and the age of targeted marketing, the ability to reach

individual consumers who fit precise sets of characteristics is incredible. More is expected of

advertisers than to put interesting messages in front of the “right people” based on general

demographics. Brands may advertise during certain TV shows or publications to reach a

particular type of media consumer. This more traditional form of mass media advertising is still

a multibillion-dollar industry, but with data-driven targeting capabilities, brands can reach

people based not only on general demographic characteristics but on specific behaviors as well.

The combination of detailed demographic information, search and digital media usage

behaviors and physical world behaviors (such as whether someone has entered a Walmart or

based on their online and physical world behavior.

The History of Advertising

Before delving into a discussion about the future of advertising, it might help to survey

the history of the field. Advertising in the modern sense emerged between the mid-19th and

early-20th centuries. At the same time that the concept of brands was developing, mass-media

platforms such as daily newspapers and radio broadcasts grew their audiences and spread their

influence geographically. Corporations, conveniently, grew large enough to have massive

budgets to spend on advertising. The promotion of products dates back thousands of years, but

the modern advertising explosion tracks explosive growth in industrial manufacturing from

roughly the mid-1800s through the entire 20th century.

It was founded in Philadephia in 1869. Today there are about 500,000 ad agencies in the world

of all shapes and sizes. They employ ever-evolving techniques to try to stay ahead of

information weary consumers.

From the mid-20th century on, advertisers conceptualized their work by breaking it down

into one of two strategic categories: “above-the-line” and “below-the-line” methods. Put

simply, “above the line” (ATL) refers to methods of advertising that target mass audiences on

mass media platforms with messages usually designed from a one-to-many point of view.

Often, “above the line” implies that the ad or ad campaign — a series of related ads meant to

work in tandem — appears on legacy media platforms. (Recall that “legacy media” has been

defined previously in this text to refer to platforms in existence before the transition to digital.)

ATL campaigns most often include television, radio and print ads as well as sponsorships. A

sponsorship is when a company pays to support an event or a mass media production in

exchange for having its brand promoted alongside the activity or content. The organizing

not an exhaustive list of ATL or BTL methods, but these examples demonstrate that ATL has

more in common with the concept of mass communication introduced in earlier chapters, and

BTL has more in common with interpersonal communication, also as previously discussed.

This is not to say that BTL messages are crafted one at a time for individual consumers. Rather,

the tone, style and method of dissemination of BTL advertising are more personal. In the 20th

century, the term ATL advertising was associated with ad agency work (mostly mass media

campaign ads), whereas BTL advertising referred to pamphlets, point-of-sale marketing and

other relatively “small” tasks that ad agencies typically did not handle. Now, there are ad

still purchase the ads on a massive scale. Thus, advertising can be massively individuated —

that is, produced for mass audiences but having the appearance of personalized messages —

much like social media content. The profit in BTL marketing comes from reaching large

audiences with tailored messages at specific times in relation to their previous purchasing and

people who have made similar purchases that advertisers can try to target people at precisely

the right moment to influence their purchase decisions. ATL and BTL advertising can work

hand in hand. Think of a summer soft drink promotion advertised on television and on the radio

(ATL) that is also backed up with neighborhood-specific billboards and hyper-targeted Twitter

messages with surprise prizes given out (BTL). BTL messages still reach large numbers of

people, but they are by definition more tailored than ATL ads. An individual ad in a BTL context

may not cost as much as a massive ad buy facilitated by an agency that primarily does ATL

advertising; however, BTL advertising can still be costly for advertisers and profitable for ad

agencies in the aggregate. For example, an ad agency that does not typically manage

multimilliondollar television ad buys might still put together hundreds of thousands of dollars

The Advertising Funnel and Other Key Concepts

funnel, as shown in the image on the left. Brands, either on their own or with the help of

advertising agencies, target audiences in different ways at specific points along the funnel to

reach their strategic goals. For example, if an unknown brand launches a new product, people

need to be made aware of both the brand and product. The brand may need to establish itself

with an awareness campaign. If Nike introduces a new Air Jordan, the branding is easily

handled. The top of the funnel areas of awareness and interest will not need as much focus as

the decision and action areas, the “down funnel” aspects of a campaign for a well-known and

well-loved brand. Another way to think of this is as a pathway a potential customer makes, also

its features. They need to move from being interested to desiring a product if they are going to

make the purchase. Ultimately, from the advertiser’s point of view, the goal is not only to move

the consumer to purchase the product but also to inspire them to advocate for the brand. This

is not conceptually complicated. The idea is to move people in straightforward steps toward

underlie consumer decisions. Consumer behavior is about as unpredictable as other forms of

human behavior. There are also ethical concerns. If a product or service proves to be harmful,

advertisers and public relations professionals have to decide if and when they will stop

marketing the brand. Advertising is challenging enough when products do not raise ethical

dilemmas. Promoting harmful products can be damaging socially, professionally and

personally. Thus, the world of consumer advertising in the mass media is more complex than

the funnel makes it seem, although it is an essential strategic model in the industry. There are

two other advertising concepts or theories that this text aims to introduce: the basic rule of

seven and the third-person effect.

The Rule of Seven

The advertising rule of seven is a rule of thumb, or what social scientists call a heuristic,

which suggests that people need to see an advertisement seven times before they act on it. Even

then, there is no guarantee that seeing something seven times will compel a person to buy a

certain product, vote for a particular politician or take any other consumer action. Instead, the

one area of influence on behavior. As previously stated in this text, social institutions such as

your family, friends, church and workplace can influence your behavior in tandem with or

contrary to what you see and hear in the mass media.

The Third-Person Effect

There is a theory in the study of mass communication called the third-person effect that

says we tend to think advertising is effective but we believe that it does not affect us. Note here

that social science theories are based on many observable facts. This is not a flight of fancy.

with a degree of certainty that some people are directly influenced by some ads some of the

time, and we can say that many people are indirectly influenced by ads almost all of the time.

For example, you may not drink Coke Zero, but you probably know what it is, and you may

know that it is now called Coke Zero Sugar after a name change in 2017. Whether you

understand the logic behind the name change or you actually buy the soft drink is another

question. Campaigns to make consumers aware of new brands and products have a track record

of widespread but still limited success. Now here is what’s interesting about the third-person

effect. Knowing that advertising can influence people’s awareness and purchase decisions, we

tend to develop a sort of double delusion where we think other people are probably affected

more than they are, and we think we are influenced less than we are. Sometimes we even base

people do? They stockpiled rice. Costco and Sam’s Club even put limits on the number of large

bags of rice people could purchase. How does the bread and milk effect work? Following the

third-person effect theory, an individual hears about a storm coming to the East Coast of the

United States. He thinks that other people are going to feel the need to go out and buy up all of

the bread and milk, so, aware of the threat and concerned about their behavior, he goes out and

buys bread and milk. Now the concern has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. People are, in

fact, buying up the bread and milk. The question is whether they are buying it up because they

are unduly influenced by messages in the mass media, or they are responding out of fear of

how other people will behave. You can imagine other people foolishly thinking a winter storm

is going to be worse than it is and you can think to yourself you had better buy the bread and

milk before those fools, but to them, you have become the fool. The third-person effect is also

Republicans, frat bros, Mexican people, snobby professors or slacker college students. Our

assumptions can be completely wrong and we may still find ourselves acting in ways to pre-

empt or counteract the imagined behavior of the imagined “other.” There are different degrees

of the third-person effect. Researchers have found it is probably strongest in situations where

groups have little understanding of one another and where the messages and perceived

outcomes are thought to be negative (note the section on Perloff). This is not to overstate the

third-person effect. Like other theories related to persuasion in the mass media the behavioral

influences it identifies have to contend with other social forces to influence behavior. Still, it is

one of the most interesting theories in the field of mass communication, and it can explain why

people race out to buy a certain product when they perceive it to be scarce. We do not want

Content Marketing

Content marketing refers to a common practice where brands produce their own content,

or hire someone else to produce it, and then market that information as an alternative to

ethically be labeled as sponsored, but it is not always done. In cases when consumers have

discovered that trusted sources were content marketers rather than independent reviewers, the

revelations have created public relations problems for the brands. Content marketing done

ethically offers financial transparency while providing valuable information and an emotional

connection to the product for consumers. It can take the form of blog posts or entire blogs.

Such marketing is usually optimized for search engines, which is to say the posts are written to

attract search engine attention as well as outside links, which also alerts search engines that

this content is valuable. Done well, branded content can be seen as more authentic than

social media profiles and posts, sponsored content in social media spaces and even viral video

and meme chasing. Brands might have their own social media profiles, or they might support

social media influencers to promote their products in a sponsored way. Brands might also use

their influencer teams or their own internal marketing teams to follow viral social media trends

profile in digital spaces. In this manner, brands can engage with potential and repeat customers.

Brands can foster relationships and encourage brand advocacy among people not being paid to

promote their products. Many brands use this form of marketing to engage consumers on a

deep level and to offer information and emotion that might not be present in other forms of

advertising.

Marketing Disambiguated

The more you study the bigger picture of marketing — which includes advertising

strategies and other research efforts meant to guide advertising strategies as part of larger sales

and production strategies—the more you recognize how focused advertising is. It may seem

that advertising is the biggest, most important element of the mass communication industry

because its revenues fuel other types of mass media production, but advertising is only one

piece of the marketing puzzle. Marketing’s four P’s — often described as product, price, place

and promotion (or position) — encompass much more than making messages to support brands

and products. Marketing professionals worry about all four and consider advertising as just one

them. HubSpot, the advertising company that provided the quick history of advertising early

on in this chapter also gets credit for helping to popularize inbound marketing. The idea of

inbound marketing is that you bring people in to learn about your product using content

marketing and then you can make sales to them in the context of a relationship where they

found you rather than vice versa. In a sense, inbound marketing turns advertising upside down

by building spaces and inviting consumers in to find what they are already looking for rather

than trying to create a need out of the glut of information in digital communication networks.

Inbound marketing is advertising’s answer to de-massification. It involves developing

the superbug media concept from previous chapters, and it is growing in popularity as people

and companies develop new and better ways of avoiding advertising. An established method

of inbound marketing is to write a blog or develop a podcast that attracts audiences who come

for information and who stay for the delicious products. To fully understand the power of

sung the praises of your new smartphone or told people they had to try a new restaurant? If you

have advocated for a brand and sent people looking for it online, you have probably become

part of someone’s inbound marketing strategy. In many ways, marketing (particularly content

marketing) bridges the concepts of advertising and public relations because it includes content

production similar to advertising and it establishes relationships with consumers, which is the

ultimate purpose of PR.

Public Relations

The history of the public relations field is often misunderstood. Many think of public

relations as organized manipulation made up of corporate, political and even non-profit

propaganda. It is often thought of as deception, but this is not always the case. In a society

fueled by networked communications, it is becoming less important to ask what messages

people receive and more important to ask what messages they seek out, according to Greg

Jarboe, author of a brief history of PR. Jarboe worked for a PR firm with offices in San

Francisco and Boston, two of the most well-established technology markets in the country. He

marketing means this is no longer the case. Mass media platforms may still be needed to reach

mass audiences outside of a brand’s collection of fans and followers, but much goodwill can

be generated by maintaining a proactive, positive and professional digital presence. While it is

true that PR often tries to put a good face on companies with all manner of reputations and

harmful business practices, it also serves charities, governmental services and small local

businesses. Not every institutional organization can have a huge PR budget, but the practices

can be taught to just about any small business owner.

The History of PR and Propaganda