Advertising Versus Publicity in Pr Campigns

Week 5 – Individual Paper

Comparison/Contrast Paper

Advertising versus Publicity in PR Campaigns

LML Technologies uses Advertising and Publicity

To Promote New Changes

Gary Mitchell

MKT/438: Marketing

Greg Rankin

January 7, 2003

Introduction

In today’s competitive marketplace, organizations rely on their public relations departments to manage their overall public image and create interest. The overall public image of any organization can greatly impact whether or not people will by their product, invest in their stock, or want to be associated with the company itself as an employee or vendor. The main purpose of a public relation’s campaign is to promote the organization to its key publics and then develop and manage a positive image between the organization and its key publics. In most cases, organizations will use a public relations campaign to generate publicity for the organization. In some cases, they will use advertising in the campaign to also generate publicity for a product launch. The purpose of this paper is to discuss how LML Technologies used both advertising and publicity to promote the organization’s name change and product branding. I will also discuss the value of unpaid advertising as well as the relationship between advertising and publicity in public relations campaigns.

LML Technologies uses Advertising and Publicity

To Promote New Changes

Prior to January 2002, LML Technologies, the company that I work for, was called Lease Marketing LTD. The company developed and marketed a leasing software application called Lease Link and the company was known in the industry as “Lease Link”. During the year 2001, Lease Link acquired two different software companies. One developed a business development application and the other developed a custom finance application. The reason for the acquisitions was to acquire additional software applications that complimented each other so that the company could package them in a suite environment to sell more systems.

After the products were integrated into a suite, senior management determined that the company could no longer be called Lease Marketing LTD or Lease Link because the applications were now more than just leasing software and the customers would be confused. Even though Lease Marketing LTD name and the application Lease Link are well known in the industry, we needed to rename the company as well as design a new “brand” name for the newly integrated application suite. This was needed to re-establish the company in the industry as more than just a “leasing software” provider. To do this, senior management hired an advertising and public relations firm to design not only a public relations campaign, but an advertising campaign as well. An advertising budget in the amount of $500,000 was created to accomplish this.

The strategy that was developed was designed to use both advertising and publicity as the means to promote the company name change and new product branding. The key was to utilize both at the same time whenever possible to obtain greater efficiencies.