To Advertise or to Publicize?: 5 Questions that Will Help You Decide

New York, NY – June 2007 – It is the age-old debate: When should a hotel or hospitality business allocate marketing dollars toward advertising - and when is PR, public relations, a better spend?
In an ideal world, you do both – put advertising dollars to work to drive sales from the national market, and utilize PR to strategically build image and target business from niche markets and specialized audiences.
But suppose you do not live in an ideal world (and most of us don’t).
Here are some occasions when, with limited marketing dollars to spend, public relations may be your best choice.
1. You are a smaller hotel, or a hospitality business with a limited budget – All things being equal, public relations is more cost-effective than advertising.
Usually, that’s because when you “do PR,” you engage a person or firm to find your strongest stories and tell them, via the “free” or editorial media. In other words, you pay for the time and sweat of the PR consultant – and that’s pretty much it.
When you buy advertising, however, you pay for the advertising consultant’s time and expenses - but you also pay for the “space” of the ad, in whatever print or electronic media you are working with.
You pay for ad space in each and every publication you target. And those dollars quickly add up.
By contrast, an effective press release, properly pitched, can land in hundreds of media outlets – and get placed again and again, on the Internet.
2. You want to be flexible – When you place advertising, you design an ad, make the purchase, that’s it. You’re done. The ad may run once or repeatedly, in one publication or more than one. It depends how many you pay for But you are assured that your message, the one you have chosen to sell, will reach “so many” eyeballs – and probably not a single one more.
There is comfort in assuredness. But there is flexibility in PR.
Suppose that a week after you have decided to advertise, a hotel owner tells you she is investing $30 million in renovations. That is now your most important story. But, oops! – You can’t change the ad that is running next week!
On the other hand, you can quickly write a press release to announce the news, and place it in appropriate media, quickly.
Or suppose you have hired a new executive, or won a prestigious national award for excellent service.
Advertising these facts will make you sound self-serving. Publicizing them will present you as professional, polished and market-savvy (and probably make your phone ring).
3. You want to target special markets for business – Suppose you are a 200-room luxury hotel that thrives on upscale leisure and FIT business travel, but also wants to target individuals and meeting planners in the group travel, financial, pharmaceutical and sports industries.
Advertising targeted at each of those markets, in addition to affluent consumers, would cost you a bundle – and take lots of ad-firm time (“ka-ching!”) to design targeted messaging and imaging.
An effective PR consultant can take the temperature of each industry’s media, carefully target appropriate messages, and nail the placements – at a fraction of the cost (and time) of a multi-layered advertising campaign.
4. You want to get the message out in “real-time” - Unless you are prepared to march into the sticky thickets of banner ads and direct e-mail advertising, nothing gets the word out quicker, or more effectively, then a well-written press release.
Need proof? Other than advertising for Presidential campaigns – or perhaps, the narcissistic Hollywood ramblings of some over-hyped movie celeb -, how many ads do you see making news on reputable news web sites? Not too many.
By contrast, hundreds of online news sources are continually running stories that began as a catchy press release, born in some ambitious PR Guy’s imagination.
That imagination could be working on behalf of your product’s message.
5. PR is a whole lot more fun – Let’s face, do you really want to sit through another two-hour advertising presentation, replete with blue suits, storyboards, and punch-the-clock creative “geniuses?”
Perhaps . . . and if so, I’ve got half-a-dozen Madison Avenue firms to recommend.
But if you’re looking for the ingenuity, flexibility and “close-to-the-mind of the masses” creativity of a consultant that spends his time effectively selling stories to the most skeptical players in the business world – journalists –, I’d advise you to go with a PR specialist.
His suits may not be as blue, and his polish not quite as slick.
But after all, you were looking for results, weren’t you?