DIFFERENTIATE PUBLIC RELATIONS FROM PUBLICITY, PRESS AGENTRY ADVERTISING AND PROPAGANDA

 PUBLIC RELATIONS

Public Relation is the managing of outside communication of an organization to create and maintain a positive image. Public Relation involves popularizing successes, downplaying failures, announcing changes, and many other activities.

PUBLICITY

Publicity is the deliberate attempt to manage the public's perception of a subject. The subjects of publicity include people (for example, politicians and performing artists), goods and services, organizations of all kinds, and works of art or entertainment.

PRESS AGENTRY

The practice of getting favorable material published, broadcast or telecast by the news media is press agentry. It is done for attracting people’s attention and for educating and informing them as well. According to Cutlip and Centre, press agentry is the creation of publicity worthy events and the use of brass bands and barkers, if necessary, to attract attention to some person or something. Petter Biddecome considers a press agent a person engaged to get press coverage and press clippings.

ADVERTISING

Advertising is a non-personal form of promotion that is delivered through selected media outlets that, under most circumstances, require the marketer to pay for message placement. Advertising has long been viewed as a method of mass promotion in that a single message can reach a large number of people. But, this mass promotion approach presents problems since many exposed to an advertising message may not be within the marketer’s target market, and thus, may be an inefficient use of promotional funds. However, this is changing as new advertising technologies and the emergence of new media outlets offer more options for targeted advertising.

Advertising is a form of communication intended to persuade an audience (viewers, readers or listeners) to purchase or take some action upon products, ideas, or services. It includes the name of a product or service and how that product or service could benefit the consumer, to persuade a target market to purchase or to consume that particular brand. These messages are usually paid for by sponsors and viewed via various media. Advertising can also serve to communicate an idea to a large number of people in an attempt to convince them to take a certain action.

PROPAGANDA

Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position. As opposed to impartially providing information, propaganda, in its most basic sense, presents information primarily to influence an audience. Propaganda often presents facts selectively (thus possibly lying by omission) to encourage a particular synthesis, or uses loaded messages to produce an emotional rather than rational response to the information presented. The desired result is a change of the attitude toward the subject in the target audience to further a political agenda. Propaganda can be used as a form of political warfare.

THE PROPAGANDA DEVICES:

The seven propaganda devices are name calling, glittering generality, transfer, testimonial, plain folks, card stacking, and band wagon. Each will be defined and discussed with exam­ples from contemporary society.

*                 Name Calling

*                 Glittering Generality

*                 Transfer

*                 Testimonial

*                 Plain Folks

*                 Card Stacking

*                 Band Wagon

HOW PUBLIC RELATIONS DIFFERS FROM ADVERTISING

International humorist Stephen Leacock defined advertising as: "the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it." But the textbook definition of advertising is: "a form of persuasion that informs people about the goods and services they can purchase." Advertising is very different from public relations. One key difference is that you always pay for the space and time of an advertisement (or commercial, which is an insert appearing on radio, television, or the Internet). By contrast, editorial coverage generated through public relations is not paid for by the organization issuing the news release. The media will pick up and publish the story because they consider it newsworthy, not as a paid advertisement.

Another crucial difference is that, in advertising, you have virtually full control over the message. Because you are paying for advertising, the ad or commercial runs your exact text (called copy), provided the copy complies with generally acceptable standards for advertising. In the case of public relations, the media outlet you are targeting is under no obligation to run the story in any form. If a media outlet does decide to run the story, an editor will generally rewrite the news release, or use pertinent information from the news release to create the news. (For instance, your news release might be used as part of a larger story on players in your industry or profession.) In addition, you have no control over when the release or news will run. All decisions are made by the editor. As you can see, public relations is a cost-effective way of getting your story out. Taking the trouble to write effective news releases and to build a relationship with the relevant media will, in time, pay dividends in the form of exposure and prestige. Best of all, public relations probably costs less than a single advertisement.

HOW PUBLIC RELATIONS DIFFERS FROM PUBLICITY

The terms public relations and publicity are often misused. They are not interchangeable. Publicity is one aspect of public relations. Often referred to as free media, the goal of publicity is to get attention in online and traditional media. News coverage, feature articles, talk show interviews, blog postings and letters-to-the-editor are examples of publicity tactics.

HOW PUBLIC RELATIONS DIFFERS FROM PROPAGANDA

Public relations campaigns also include propaganda to manipulate public opinion. Whereas the propaganda is communication, verbal or no verbal that attempts to influence the motives beliefs or attitudes of people. Its function is not essentially to convert rather its function is to attract followers and to keep them in line. The task of propaganda is to blanket every area of human activity so that the environment of the individual is changed to absorb the campaign view. Originally it meant simply spreading a belief, as the term propaganda was first used for a religious mission preaching Christianity but its misuse particularly during the last 80 years, brought it into disrepute. But even today propaganda is an important tool of public relations. 

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