Advertising and Public Relations: Challenges and Implications

Advertising and Public Relations start their mission from focusing on feelings of their audiences to find a client or to change its relations, attitude or thinking. These two subjects have many similarities, but they are different for whom the information intended to reach and how it should affect the target audience. Until recently, advertising was an instrument to inform the audience to find clients. Today, advertising becomes more targeted, cost-efficient and search oriented. To illustrate, Google, Yandex and other search engines offer unique advertising opportunities to access clients worldwide, which no other media can offer for available budget and for 24 hours a day.


Introduction
Advertising and Public Relations start their mission from focusing on feelings of their audiences to find a client or to change its relations, attitude or thinking. These two subjects have many similarities, but they are different for whom the information intended to reach and how it should affect the target audience. Until recently, advertising was an instrument to inform the audience to find clients. Today, advertising becomes more targeted, cost-efficient and search oriented. To illustrate, Google, Yandex and other search engines offer unique advertising opportunities to access clients worldwide, which no other media can offer for available budget and for 24 hours a day.
Concerning public relations, previously it was an instrument to work and communicate effectively with public. Today, public relations covers areas related to leading and changing public views and thinking. For example, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social media allow organizations not only access, communicate with the public but also tackle key issues, access new social groups and constantly involve them to change their thinking, attitudes and character. As the first step to define the challenging issues and implications of the two subjects, it is necessary to overview the instruments of advertising and public relations from angle of historical changes. Therefore, Table 1 outlines major instruments of advertising and public relations of the past, present and in the future. Table 1 shows main instruments of advertising and public relations. Analyzing the Table, one can conclude that advertising and public relations are gradually changing from mass to target media, and in future, it will change to interactive target media. This is one of the challenging issues from technological point. Companies, which will be first to acquire those technologies will have competitive advantage and can grow their audiences enormously. Analysis supports that the effects of changing technology are of great concern to the advertising and PR industries [1]. The review of literature and papers will provide a broader scope of knowledge and understanding of advertising and PR effects on people, their behavior and the future. According to marketing theory [2], advertising and public relations is a part of the promotion mix, which relates to persuading audiences to buy products, concepts and ideas. Here [2], advertising defined as any paid of nonpersonal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods or services whereas public relations defined as nonpaid, nonpersonal stimulation of demand for a product, service or business unit by planning significant news about it or a favorable presentation of it in the media.
However, which is the best tool to sell products, advertising or public relation? There is no simple answer as they are part of the marketing field which requires many other factors to be taken into account. Bittlingmayer G [3] suggests that when looking at the problems the firms faces in promoting their goods, one can understand why advertising used in some cases and not in others. It is true that it depends on how big is the company, what is the budget etc.
The Table 2 shows the outcome of preliminary evaluation of the differences of advertising and public relations on key components, classified from personal experience.  Table 2 shows that public relations include broader knowledge of audiences, scope of activities and factors to communicate effectively with target audiences compared to advertising. It is a huge area, which requires many competences and skills to persuade, analyze and build relationships. However, many organizations hire advertising specialist to take the role of public relations. Because many see public relations as an area which help to promote ideas, products or personalities and relate it to distribution of press-releases to the target audiences. It is a wrong perception and probably one of the main reasons why afterwards PR perceived negatively [4]. Advertising specialists cannot be the best PR specialists without training and education. From Table  3, one can conclude that is a key issue why many organizations fail PR campaigns with their approaches with human resources.
Why advertising and PR are on the agenda of almost all organizations? Why should organizations can apply various other tools?
Now, we can compare advertising and public relations with other instruments of promotion mix to show their advantages. Table 3 compares four elements of promotion mix. Table 3 shows why advertising and public relations are of the highest priority for organizations. One can see that advertising and PR are wide in audience scope, which is main factor to reach potential customers. One the other side, only PR can improve organization's image via effective communication on negative information from customers, state bodies etc. Application of PR is also wide and it includes not only business customers but also government, public organization and individuals [5].
The Tables 2 and 4 demonstrates also how important the challenges and implications of the advertising and publics relations to customers, governments, public organizations, individuals and generally to our societies.
After overviewing the technological trends, main components of advertising and public relations and their comparison with elements of promotion mix, the next step is to classify their challenging issues. Table 4 outlines key challenges of advertising and public relations in various areas [6].
From analysis of literature, internet and personal experiences, Table 4 consists of at least 8 challenging issues of advertising and public relations. The Table indicates positive and negative challenges in these areas. From all, the most important issues are the corporate efficiency and development as well as issues related to ethics, transparency and trends. Their implications are so high that it can grow the business instantly or destroy it with only one action or campaign. For example, the one campaign with the highest cost will increase the sales of product many times so that it will increase the market share of the organization and its image at the same time. However, in a case when low budget advertising will create negative feelings in segments of the organization, which had high market share, advertising can cause spreading of negative word of mouth and end business only because of cultural perception, content or ethical issues [7].
Taking challenges as key factor for further study, the following Table 5 shows positive and negative implications of advertising and public relations actions.
Based on factors analyzed above, Table 5   With professional team, framing helps to understand how people evaluate information provided via advertising and public relations.

It improves activities and information for sales and effective communication
It can be difficult for audiences if the framing team will change and customers will not understand a new team's approaches and messages. This can stimulate audiences for a new brand, product, organization positive and negative implications. It shows that advertising and public relations require professionalism and special approaches in order to bring positive outcome and effects. Sometimes, it does not matter the amount of budget for advertising and public relations but rather the content or skills, which can draw positive or negative feeling of the potential audience. If information creates a negative feeling in customers, they will try to avoid the organization and its products until they will get convinced that the product is the best in the market. Vice versa, if it creates positive feeling, nothing stops customers from buying or interacting with organization [8].
The worst case is when advertised harmful products with positive effect on customers stimulate sales. If not in short term, but in long term this will hurt customers and it will be late to do anything. However, it depends on many factors when it hurts the organization directly. Table 6 demonstrate the level of implications of harmful products and services based on effects from advertising and PR. From Table 6 above, one can see that advertising and PR of harmful products can have different level of negative implications for producers and consumers. When the truth becomes open, the implications are bad for both an organization and those who consumed the products and became sick, for example. The problem is that the negative implications for consumers are high in any case whereas producers will not face any negative implications until it becomes clear that products are harmful [9].
The organization will face negative implications only when harmful effects become open as a truth after negative cases or experiments [10]. The point is that the truth can become open after 5 years or 50 years. Until that time, many changes can happen that it will be difficult to find responsible person or team for producing or advertising the harmful products. From ethical issues, for example, for medical products, it requires regulations for transparency and open research data.