30 - Perceptions and Realities of the Integration of Advertising and Public Relations

Summary

The changing nature of the communication landscape and the rise of new message platforms, including social media, has heightened the need for a more integrated approach to advertising and public relations. This chapter examines how practitioners view the integration of advertising and public relations, and provides recommendations for future practitioners on how to maximize efforts towards integration.

Introduction

The integration of advertising and public relations within organizations is not a novel concept. As early as 1904, the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business was offering a course that taught ‘publicity, agency, advertising, forms and correspondence’ (Maynard, 1941, p. 383). Early leaders in both advertising and public relations, such as Albert Lasker and Edward Bernays, respectively, were often able to combine the disciplines to best serve their organizations.

Today, the concept of integration can be found extensively in the trade publications, with headlines such as ‘Can PR and advertising play nicely together’ (Davila, 2012) and ‘2016 will be the year that PR truly embraces integration and inclusivity’ (Barrat, 2016), to the slightly more aggressive ‘Integrate or die’ (Campbell, 2015). And though these headlines might attempt to convince their readers that the concept is relatively new and at the cutting edge of innovation in providing for clients’ communication needs, the truth is that the integration of different disciplines in professional communication has been a topic of conversation for quite a while, and has been executed (both successfully and unsuccessfully) for many years. On the surface, the integration of advertising and public relations may appear to simply be a recycled term for ‘integrated marketing communications’ (IMC) that was in vogue during the 1970s-1990s. But it has been identified as an unique area (Smith & Place, 2013) and some scholars have suggested that integrated communication has replaced IMC (Grunig, 1992).

A substantial amount of scholarly and professional writing has been dedicated to the effectiveness of the integration of advertising and public relations, in various forms, over the past fifty years. However, there has been little empirical research that has examined the perceptions of practitioners in the field with regard to this integration.