Tom Foremski recently wrote a piece titled, ‘The coming war between PR agencies and ad agencies‘ on ZDnet.
He was primarily looking at how PR agencies are encroaching ad agency domain, starting with Edelman’s ‘Show Up Differently’ messaging.
Of course, he misses critical points like content marketing and social media in the mix which muddy the pitch wonderfully. Both content marketing and social media efforts are long-term, something that traditional ad agencies shun or avoid getting into, preferring the project-based approach of big-bang communication put in front of target groups using paid push and moving on.
That is of course changing, with ad agencies making deeper in-roads into social media and thinking 360 degrees for clients, either on their own (like us, Ogilvy – a plug, of course!) or other agencies who are acquiring social media agencies.
Now, here’s a head-on collision, from India, where ad agencies are using their bread and butter service – paid, print advertising, to do something that is a PR agency’s domain!
A press release, as a paid advertisement! This Kellogg’s ad is from The Times of India dated March 29, 2014. (Click on the image for larger view)
Kellogg’s Breakfast Pledge is a classic quasi-CSR PR ploy. Of course, efforts like this (“take a pledge online and we’ll donate something to the needy”) have faced backlash in other countries (example 1, example 2) where the main concern has been that the brand should be donating with or without people seeing the brand message and taking the ‘symbolic’ pledge or offering something to the brand in the form of tweets, retweets or Facebook Likes.
That aside, this ad is a standard press release, complete with the inverted pyramid structure – a catchy (albeit long) headline, a shocking ‘factoid’, a study to prove that factoid and what Kellogg’s is doing about it.
It also includes 3rd party validation, from a non-descript, named banking professional, a teacher in one of the schools where the program has started, a volunteer who was involved in ‘gifting’ and the executive director of a partner of the program. It of course has a quote from someone in Kellogg’s marketing. The two things missing – a boilerplate titled, ‘About Kellogg’s India’ and contact details of Kellogg’s India PR person and the PR agency contact details!
The interesting point here is that such press releases were usually aimed at media intermediaries, who were expected to do the diligence check and report what they think is apt, to their (and Kellogg’s) end audiences. Here, Kellogg’s has disintermediated the journalist and gone directly to the end audience with everything they have to say, unfiltered. You may ask, what is stopping brands from doing so? Money, I’d wager, since print ads are expensive.
So, does communicating a press release as an advertisement make it as credible as something coming out of an editorial piece, which has allegedly passed through journalistic rigor?
This is not an isolated incident, though.
Here’s another press release, shared as an advertisement, on the front page (jacket ad, even before page 1, no less!), in The Hindu, Bangalore edition, today! The brand? OLX. (Click on the image for larger view)
And this, after a full-page assault on Sunday, in The Times of India, without the ‘press release’ (added at the end of this post, for reference). This is of course, continuing from OLX’s new TVC. The headline says, ‘Womaniya, you’ve got the power’.
It even has a sub-head: ‘OLX brings fresh perspective to women empowerment’. And one more line below it, unlike a press release – ‘Urges them to use cellphone as SELLphone and celebrate the Joy of Selling’.
The hyperbole of connecting selling via OLX to women empowerment is something I’m sure will be killed by the journalists who may have got this press release (if at all!). The body copy (is it ‘body copy’ at all, given that we’re talking of a press release as an advertisement? The lines are surely blurring!) goes on to say that the TVC shows, ‘an empowered, smart and vivacious woman protagonist who reinforces the ease and simplicity of the OLX Mobile app’.
And, ‘The ad uses a powerful tagline that will reiterate with millions of mobile phone users across India – Ab Phone Ko Banaao SELLphone’. I’m not entirely sure they meant the word ‘reiterate’ there – has to be something else! Relate? Resonate? And such confidence that it ‘will’ resonate (or reiterate)!!
The ad… aka press release, also quotes OLX’s India CEO and the creative director of the agency which created the TVC.
Unlike the Kellogg’s ‘press release’, this one actually has the boilerplate (About OLX)! And no, thankfully, it does not have the contact details of the communications team and the PR agency!
Enough of the ad copy. You see what’s happening here?
I’ve been in the PR side in a couple of companies and in 2 PR agencies. I have seen people writing such hyperbole filled press release forever. They still do! Why? Perhaps in the hope that some of that translate into editorial space too, by impacting the journalist reading it. It usually doesn’t and journalists have since taken to Twitter to make fun of such ‘ambitious’ press releases.
So, brands have a new weapon now. Ignore the journalists who make fun of such press release. ‘Let us go directly to people with our hyperbole’ by paying our way through it!
No, I’m not judging the ad aka press release. It may mighty well work for you – it doesn’t, for me.
But it raises a lot of interesting questions.
Who writes long-form copy like this? OLX and Kellogg’s ad agency? Or, their PR agency?
If it is the PR agency, are they the new ad agency?
What do journalists think of this new technique of taking press releases directly to people without it going through the journalistic prism?
What do ad agencies think of this very-verbose form of advertisement?
You’ve got more questions? Or some answers? Share them in the comments!
Interesting trend, though!
