I was glued to the television set throughout my formative years - the '60s. And like most other children, my parents joined me to watch from time to time. But in my house there was a twist. My father walked out during the programming and came back for the commercials. He was an ad man through and through.
My father worked in advertising on the agency side at Grey and the client side at Hoechst. Thanks to his career (and several hundred advertising sales reps), our home was a comprehensive library of magazines. As early as 8 years old, I was captivated not only by Seventeen and Life, but also by the ads, articles (and yes the pictures too) in Playboy, Esquire and The New Yorker.
When I left home for college, a business career was the farthest thing from my mind. I was bound for either medical school or a graduate degree in psychology. In 1984, back in New York from graduate school, I discovered that some of the public health work that I had been doing in Virginia was very much like PR. This came as a shock, because until that time I had thought that PR people were either evasive Presidential press secretaries or gum-smacking Hollywood press agents.
I approached my father for his advice on networking, but he was taken aback when I told him that I wanted to explore a career in PR. To him, the choice was clear - the honest and forthright communications of advertising versus the "underhanded manipulation" of PR.
I had a different perspective.
Welcome to DTC
What I understood then, and what is just as true in today's DTC environment, is that essentially advertising is "bought" communications, while PR is "earned" communications. Just as ad and edit pages together make a complete magazine, DTC advertising and healthcare PR are each important, essential components of an effective brand marketing program.
With the least restrictive guidelines for DTC advertising in history now in place, it is tempting for healthcare brand managers to gravitate toward advertising almost exclusively at the expense of their PR program.
This is understandable, since most of the people controlling the marketing communications budgets came up through the sales and marketing side and are more comfortable with the "guaranteed" results of DTC advertising. Admittedly, PR results are more difficult to gauge than advertising is, but is no less important to brand-building goals.
Through flexible, in-depth educational and advocacy programs, PR can achieve marketing goals for a brand that are unattainable with DTC advertising alone. This theory is recognized by some of today's visionary business leaders, inside the healthcare arena and beyond. Word of mouth has been incredibly important to us, and ultimately that's what a brand is - the things people say about you when you're not there."
Measurement is Essential
At Edelman, we recognize that PR has the power to go beyond the factual into the emotional, establishing a brand as a meaningful part of a consumer's life. This insight was the inspiration for Edelman BrandC.A.R.E.T, a process designed to build, nurture, sustain and even change a brand's image.
This research-based process uses the interactivity, depth and flexibility of public relations to build a brand's credibility, advocates, relationships with consumers and the experiences that the brand delivers.
As PR professionals, it is our responsibility to develop reliable, effective measurement tools that can help demonstrate the brand-building capability of PR before, during and after a campaign launch.
In advertising budgets, money is always allocated for the research, measurement and refinement of a DTC ad before it is finalized and approved.
Like our advertising colleagues, we must insist that part of our PR budgets be invested in research.
Measuring the effectiveness of a PR program is difficult, but not impossible. The fact is that PR measurement will never be as concrete as DTC advertising. It is easier to simply gauge the consumer reach and awareness built by advertising rather than PR's specific impact on the depth of consumer brand conviction, the motivational value of their education or their intent to purchase a product or service.
We are committed to developing refined, quantitative methods of measurement, but looking only at advertising equivalencies of newspaper articles and television stories is like seeing a black-and-white picture of a rainbow. Missing are the varied, unpredictable and often surprising hues that are seen daily in the world of public relations.
So.if you think this child of the television age is on a soapbox, you're right. I hope you'll join me in looking at PR as something much more than a way to get a few news clips, deal with a media crisis or supplement DTC advertising. PR's very complexity and intangibility is what makes it, as my dad would say, "manipulative".but as I would say "compelling" as a marcom tool.
Nancy Turett is president of the healthcare and consumer divisions of Edelman Public Relations Worldwide. She can be reached at 212/704-8195.