Book Review: The Fall of Advertising & the Rise of PR

At PlayhouseSquare, my colleagues in the marketing department and I handle both advertising and publicity. I spend more of my time on publicity, so my curiosity piqued when I came across the book The Fall of Advertising & The Rise of PR, written by Al and Laura Ries and published in 2002.

Unfortunately, this book was a chore to slog through. The tone of the authors is so bitter that I suspect that one of them was humiliated by a termination from an advertising agency, or perhaps suffered a concussion at the hand of a Clio Award-wielding ex-lover.

Some of the references are so dated that I'm only familiar with the topics through anecdotes told by my parents. I can't imagine a recent college grad relating to this book. How many 20-somethings know what a Yugo is?

And then there's the litany of suggestions rejected by their clients with the not-so-subtle assertion that these clients were stupid for not listening to them.

Further, it's hard trust the assertions of authors whose foresight has proven to be less than reliable. For example, they asserted that 3G phones and Amazon would prove to be failures.

This book's coup de grace came when I was adding it to my list on goodreads.com. I mistakenly typed in "the rise of advertising" and to my surprise, up came a listing for a book entitled The Rise of Advertising & the Fall of PR, published in 2009 with a forward by Al Ries.

All this said, I did agree with some of the points made by the authors. I do believe that using PR to build a brand and advertising to maintain a brand can be the right strategy to use in many cases. But with today's fragmented communications channels, I do not believe there is a one-size-fits-all answer.

Nor do I believe that either PR or advertising is falling or rising - both are changing.