Al Ries and Laura Ries: The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR

Reviewed by MICHAEL BARTROM

Okay, I admit it - I'm a Google junkie. So when I came to review the new marketing book by Al Ries I did a quick Google search. And came up with five million references.

Even allowing for Google's remarkable capacity to find stuff on the web, this was extraordinary and confirmed all the things I had been told about this book by friends overseas.

Ries, with Jack Trout, wrote Marketing Warfare in 1986 and the two were responsible for creating the concept of positioning, which has become fundamental in the modern understanding of brands and marketing.

In their latest book, just released in New Zealand, Ries with co-author and daughter Laura Ries, argues that companies are wasting huge amounts of money using advertising to build their brands.

That's something, the authors say, advertising is incapable of doing.

The Fall of Advertising eloquently and humorously maintains that brands can only be built using publicity, and that advertising should just be used to maintain brands that have successfully been created using public relations.

Given that I'm a principal of an Auckland PR consultancy, you would be surprised if I disagreed. Which, of course, I don't.

But setting aside any parochialism, this is a highly entertaining and thought-provoking book, which those responsible for building and maintaining brands will be ill-advised to ignore.

The authors point out that not only is advertising the wrong tool for the brand building job but advertising is often self-serving.

"The goal of traditional advertising is not to make product famous," they say. "The goal of traditional advertising is to make the advertising famous."

Advertising suffers, they say, because it is not believable, it lacks credibility in the prospect's mind and it is therefore ill-suited to delivering new messages or building new brands.

But advertising does have a role in brand maintenance, to reinforce the perceptions that publicity has formed in the prospect's mind.

The authors approach their topic exclusively from a branding angle and focus on the relative merits of advertising and PR to build a brand.

But don't expect the advertising world to give up its claim on the corporate purse-strings easily. Ries senior and junior predict a bitter and protracted rearguard action.

A final word from the authors: "Marketing has entered the world of public relations". And who am I to argue?

* HarperCollins $49

* Michael Bartrom is a director of public relations consultancy Trio Communications

* Email Michael Bartrom