What Don Draper knew about public relations

The world's most famous fictional ad man, Don Draper, spoke derisively of public relations. But from time to time he seemed to grudgingly admit that his profession's less flashy cousin had its uses. Like when he scored an interview with the Wall Street Journal to establish himself as the face of his upstart agency and to use his mystique to give the agency some much-needed cachet. Or his famous "Why I'm Quitting Tobacco" op-ed in which he portrayed the agency's loss of its biggest client, Lucky Strike, as a principled and revolutionary stand against a harmful product. 

That rivalry between advertising and PR, and the mutual disdain in which each has often held the other, came to mind when I read this flawed and self-serving article championing the virtues of PR over advertising in the context of hyper-expensive Super Bowl commercials. First, it is strikingly dishonest to demean advertising's value based on Super Bowl ads, which, like the game itself, are indeed bloated, self-indulgent spectacles. It's like condemning the culinary arts on the basis of a cruise ship buffet. 

It's also self-defeating. Super Bowl commercials derive no small part of their value by generating earned media and social media engagement, the hallmarks of an integrated advertising/marketing/public relations campaign. The emphasis on "integrated" is deliberate. Not every business goal can be achieved through advertising, and not every business goal can be achieved through public relations. And sometimes, an organization needs both working in tandem to engage the right audiences. An investment in one discipline increases the return on investment of the other.

For example, when the Robert Morris University men's basketball team reaches the NCAA tournament, we will buy outdoor digital ads that that include social media feeds. One or two media outlets inevitably produce a story about the Twitter or Facebook boards, which broadens the reach of the ads, at no additional cost, and boosts social media engagement. In 2010, on the eve of an advertising campaign, I arranged an editorial board visit by our president to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which yielded this front-page story. Earned media doesn't merely amplify your message. It gives you third-party validation that money just can't buy. 

Just ask Don Draper.