And David Ogilvy’s famous quip starts to explain why:

“What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form.”

You see, ‘content’ has evolved from the Mad Men days of a single-minded proposition designed to sell a product or brand in one tightly-crafted nugget of branded copywriting.

Photo Credit: flickr Creative Commons, Nationaal Archief

With the convergence of media (digital, ATL, outdoor and mobile) driving an unprecedented convergence of communications and a Global Village of hyper-connected people, brands can no longer rely on the single creative ‘Big Idea’ carried via television commercials and matching luggage of advertising applications.

Advertisers who continue to rely on their thirty-second TV spot during Glee, supported by a print ad, perhaps the roadside billboard, or even that direct mail… just won’t survive.

This idea is by no means new. We have seen the evolution of communications over recent years. However, what I believe is missing from the boxing match, is the acknowledgement that PR agencies have been the revolutionaries in driving this through-the-line engagement.

At its heart, Public Relations understands that rather than having one monolithic advertising-led idea, we need to create a cluster of messages, of tactical outputs, and of engagement mechanics, all working for a common goal.

It’s a long tail evolution, though. There is still an obvious appeal to the notion that seeing the same thing in different places will ‘reinforce’ the brand’s messaging and lead to people enacting the call to action. Indeed, advertising theory is still based on the linear funnel.

But, the funnel no longer exists.

As advertising guru Jeremy Bullmore points out: “… a brand is a subjective thing. No two people, however similar, hold precisely the same view of the same brand[i]”.

So let’s take that further to “no one advertising message, however creatively compelling, will resonate and drive action to the groups of people who are digitally hyper-connected.”

The ye olde notion that PR is advertising’s poor cousin left to gobble the crumbs of the client’s budget once the creative idea has been pitched, is fast disappearing. In effect, the top-down approach has taken a 180 degree turn, and more and more clients are looking at their Public Relations and Communications consultants to drive holistic programs of engagement.

We are seeing clients understand that their target audiences are being influenced by their peers. And this peer-influence is driven by experience. In other words; I bought Tina Fey’s latest masterpiece, Bossypants, based purely on the power of my Twitter friends’ recommendations. And gosh, it’s good!

The Public Relations role is changing largely because of the consumer shift from traditional communications to one that is digital. Many PR professionals are finding it necessary to learn new skills and to examine how social media can impact a brand’s reputation. Sentiment analysis, influencers, message adoption and engagement levels are all metrics we are using to craft and align our clients’ communications outputs. Understanding how our clients’ publics are relating to them, and developing strategies around where we need to move the needle, are now increasingly guiding our clients’ marketing and advertising efforts. We have even seen digital relations lead HR outreach efforts.

Essentially, this digital convergence is leading us to look at communications in a new strategic way. And with a history of Public Relations as a nimble discipline, the Mad Men of advertising agencies are probably feeling pretty nervous and staring into the bottom of their whiskey tumblers right now.

This fundamental power change in the Advertising vs. Public Relations boxing match, is an exciting one and one that personally drove me back to PR rather than moving to another ad agency.

Perhaps the only thing stopping this colossal change of power, is our susceptibility in demonstrating an impact on the bottom line for our clients.

Jeremy Woolf recently made the comment “We have always taken a longer term view to communications and while I agree measurement has been a struggle (reflecting more the unwillingness for companies to spend as opposed to any lack of desire from my profession), this longer term view is where I feel the PR folks add the greatest amount of value.”

Indeed we need to continue to weave effectiveness and measurement into the fabric of our communications strategies. And we are not talking about AVE here. We are talking about making tangible impacts to our clients’ sales, profitability and longevity. Something we are proving more and more.

And I’m certainly onboard this good ship lollipop. Are you?

Making an advertising investment isn’t a decision that should be taken lightly. However, for brands just getting set up on Facebook and looking to do a quick promotion of their page, advertising within the medium is a great option. But before jumping head first, consider the following about your audience and their reactions:

1. What type of action are you hoping to incite – do you want people to know the page exists and follow it, or do you want users to like the page and participate in an activity or contest? The latter action – though harder to encourage with just advertising – will yield better engagement in the long-term.
2. How will you sustain users’ interest after they’ve clicked the ad and started following your page?

Once you’ve evaluated your audience and considered the type of outcome your ad is helping to achieve, there are a number of ways to evaluate the budget and time investment needed to maintain the project:

Ad campaign costs per day

Facebook ads offer the opportunity to control how much you spend on a daily basis. Once your budget has been met for the day, your ads stop appearing until the following day. To get an idea of what type of budget you should set, create a dummy Facebook ad to receive an estimate of the cost per click price based on the content of your ad and targeted demographics (you can segment audience by gender, geography, interests, etc.). Then, multiply this number by the number of clicks you’re aiming to receive throughout the life of the campaign and divide by the amount of days or weeks you have to achieve this goal.

Cost per click vs. Cost per Thousand Impressions

• If you aren’t sure whether to choose to pay per click or pay per impressions: Cost per click (CPC) works best when you want the ad viewer to take a specific action (register on a website, ‘Like’ a Facebook page, download a certain file etc.), whereas cost per impressions (CPM) works best when you’d like to simply inform the user of a specific activity (similar to a roadside billboard). In terms of cost, CPC allows you to specify how much you are willing to pay each time a user clicks on your ad; CPM allows you to identify how much you will pay for 1,000 views of your ad. In general, the CPC model is favored by most Web advertisers because the goal is to incite the ad viewer to commit to a certain action.

Time investment

• It’s best to experiment with Facebook Ads using the easy step-by-step process to get a hold of as much information about your projected results before you enter into a formal engagement. While the set-up process is simple to start and run, Text 100 clients report needing approximately two hours of time per day to monitor the performance and improve ad content, targeting, etc.

Projected Results

The chart below shows the advertising results for a pilot campaign run in India. The brand ran advertising on both Facebook and Google with a budget of about 780 Euros (approximate $1,125) for one month. The client opted to invest slightly more in Facebook’s variations because the target demographic was shown to spend more time there and Google ads run at a higher expense in the market, which made the Facebook investment more cost-effective. This project provided valuable insights about how each platform delivered so the client could make a more educated budget estimate.

While these results are positive in the short-term, navigating the waters of Facebook Ads is tricky and needs a solid integrated strategy to yield truly beneficial results for a brand. Getting people to click on an ad is just step one. If your goal is real engagement with your audience, couple your ad campaign with a number of communications and outreach tactics to further your message and keep users coming back for more.

On the latter, the New York Times summarized the study well. HP analyzed 16 million Twitter messages over forty days, and found a huge percentage of tweets amplifying mainstream media stories. Wouldn’t this seem to suggest that, even while we’ve all witnessed the decimation of many reputable publications as the “new model(s)” get figured out, that perhaps we might still tend to underestimate the importance, and perhaps the ultimate value, of our most trusted news and entertainment sources? 

In fact, the HP study didn’t surprise us quite so much here at Text 100. Last Fall, our research arm (then Context Analytics, now Beyond) published its own study, “The Power 50: Most Influential Blogs. A Study on Blogger Credibility in Traditional Media.” It found a clear synergy between so-called “mainstream media” and a rising class of small, but powerfully influential bloggers, many of whom serve as sources of commentary and/or “industry expertise” for major publications. But the study’s findings also indicated that mainstream media is still seen as highly influential and trusted, on the whole.

So, mainstream media has been hit hard by digital and mobility. Bloggers are ascending. New platforms and subscriptions models are being born. But mainstream media drives the trends. I think Philippe Guelto, a VP with Elle’s publisher, got it right (quoted from AdAge), when he said, “This is a work in progress. I don’t think this is something that is set in stone either for us or for Apple. I’d rather work with them to improve it over time than just sit on the sidelines.”

Or, we could sum it up like PopSci does in its tagline: The Future Now. 

Best to climb aboard.

To which I would say, don’t get too hung up on so-called hard ROI.

Of course, it would be great if such a correlation is eventually shown. But in this case, the community of passionate fans that has formed around this ad is its own return on investment. Volkswagen has indelibly imprinted in the minds of consumers associations with fun and youth and family. You can practically close your eyes and feel the good will, kind of like a, um, force, permeating everything. It will pay off in many ways, over time. VW doesn’t have to see that ROI in a spreadsheet to know it’s there.

94% of touch points in today’s “last click model” are thrown away and not given any credit for a sale.

- Esco Strong, Director, Microsoft Advertising Institute

Rob Birgfeld over at SmartBlog on Social Media has a good post on why ROI as measured by the last click – the last click before a sale – is a fundamentally flawed model. (See Live from Ad:Tech — The Myth of the “Last Click”).

Citing findings presented at Ad:Tech by Esco Strong, Rob goes on to note that “social media engagement — done the right way — can and will continue to affect customer perceptions of your brand.”

I couldn’t agree more. Let’s expand on that. Assigning nearly all monetary value to the last click basically assumes that nothing else influenced a purchase except that last action. In short, that’s absurd.

Microsoft Advertising Institute’s study notes that “users interact with an average of 2.2 other ads from the same brand over two days before the conversion.”

Let’s take that a step further and imagine that the same people eventually clicking on ads and purchasing are also consuming lots of information from their own peers and others through social networks, blogs, forums and even (gasp) traditional media.

So while people might be interacting with 2.2 other ads before the last click, there’s a great deal of opinion-sharing and perception-shaping that happens completely independent of those ads. An ad might be the digital channel that eventually takes me to the point of sale but in most cases I wouldn’t even be clicking on that ad unless I’d first gotten an opinion from someone I trust.

Pure visibility still matters a lot – this isn’t a diss to advertising. But consider “high-involvement” purchasing decisions – say, buying a cell phone – and the amount of thought people put into those decisions. A single interactive ad isn’t going to just whisk you through the entire thought process to the point of sale. If you’re spending any time online these days, odds are that someone else (an actual human being) influenced your purchase in some way.

For example, we’ve done some work with clients that points to notably higher conversion rates for traffic referred by social media and blogs compared to paid search. As the ability to better connect social media to metrics like conversion rates continues to evolve, I think we’ll begin to have a much more sophisticated and measurable view of influence over the purchasing decision…certainly more than the last click.

Joseph Kingsbury

twitter.com/jkingsbury

Not surprising at all to see yet another validation for the power of advertising.

But buried in the same press release – under a sub-head of “More Study Findings” — was data that pointed to the greater power that PR has in maintaining consumer confidence in financial institutions:

“When asked what factors would increase confidence in the safety and soundness of their financial institution, respondents cited:

– Seeing regular advertising for that institution (25 percent)

– Receiving regular mail or e-mail offers from that institution (25 percent)

– Regularly seeing internet offers/advertising from that institution (21 percent)

– Reading positive stories in the press about that institution (44 percent)” 

Read that last bullet again – it clearly states that reading positive stories in the press bolsters much more confidence than seeing regular advertising. From my perspective, Nielsen has buried the lede.

I don’t want to pick a fight with my advertising brethren and get into yet another debate about the power of advertising versus the power of PR. (Please see the recent study Text 100 and Context Analytics released for our point of view on that topic.)

Instead, I would like to simply point out that the study underscores for me that the value of PR continues to be misunderstood, and therefore it continues to be under-valued, especially as a means for bolstering brand reputation during a recession.

We’ve all seen PR budgets cut or eliminated recently as a result of the economic challenges companies are facing. I would contend that pulling back on PR is exactly the way to ensure ongoing damage to your brand reputation, both during the recession and after the recovery begins.

This recession is now as much about consumer confidence as anything else. What consumers – in fact, all stakeholders – are seeking is anything that will bolster their confidence in companies and institutions. Because consumers’ priorities have changed, companies must demonstrate that they are delivering not what customers want, but what they need.

If advertising can do that, great. But press coverage that reflects the strength of a company’s leadership, operations, products and services, while also demonstrating an innate understanding of stakeholders’ needs, is invaluable during these tough times.

Bottom line: companies need to focus now more than ever on maintaining and building brand reputation – and they must leverage communications channels that enable them to tell their story in a complete, compelling, and authentic way.

Scott Friedman

What we found was that media prominence is in fact linked to brand value, especially for certain product categories, underscoring the importance of PR’s role in maintaining and building a brand. In the current environment where budgets are under pressure and corporate reputations are quickly undone, companies should pay close attention to how the media can impact the financial value of their brand.

Here are some of the key findings:

• Overall, we found that how often a company appeared in the press accounted for over a quarter of the brand value among Interbrand’s 100 most valuable brands.

• The relationship between media prominence and brand value depends on “product involvement” – i.e., the degree to which customers research a given product or solution prior to purchase. Media prominence was more associated with brand value for “high involvement” products compared to “low involvement” products. Media prominence was a particularly important component of brand value for computer-related industries, such as software and hardware manufacturers, as well as computer and Internet service companies, accounting for 48 percent of differences between companies’ brand values.
• Advertising expenditures, however, predicted brand value only for “low involvement” products, and accounted for very little brand value among “high involvement” products.
• These results suggest that the more complex a product is to a buyer, the more likely they are to research the product category and to look for information that they can trust. Much has been said of the increasing power of word-of-mouth and distrust in advertising in the past few years. If unpaid media placement, as opposed to paid media (or advertising), is more credible to buyers, then it too should play a key role in building brand value for high involvement brands.

Perhaps the most important take away message from this study is that, regardless of the direction of causation, a sizable amount of brand value, particularly for high involvement industries, is tied into media coverage.  So, even if one interprets this study as showing that high brand value leads to more media coverage, it is still important for media coverage to be carefully managed since it is the window through which others will see your brand.

To see the report, click here

-Seth Duncan and Nils Mork-Ulnes