Reframing the PR v Digital PR Debate

PR’s and Digital PR’s don’t always work well together. There, I’ve said it. But I don’t think that’s the way it should be - both for the people on either “side” or the brands we work for.

As marketers, we’re tasked with the same two goals:

1. Making Brand Memorable

2. Selling Products

But why the debate? In order to fully understand it, we need to know where it originated from, so I’m going to take you on a whistlestop history lesson:

• 1704 - A real estate notice posted in the Boston Newsletter was the first newspaper advert

• 1841 - Volney Palmer, the first advertising agency, was set up in Phildelphia, selling Ad space

• 1867 - The first billboard rental. Just three years later in 1870, there were more than 300 companies working in this space.

• 1922 - The first paid radio ad, similarly to the newspaper ad in 1704, it was for a real estate company

• 1941 - Bulova Watches ran the first tv commercial, reminding America how it “runs on Bulova time”.

In 1954 we see what I like to call “the shift”.

Malboro had an issue. Because their cigarettes included filters, they were seen as too feminine, meaning men didn’t want to be seen smoking them, essentially cutting out half of their target market.

Leo Burnett, an advertising executive from Chicago, provided the answer. He created the (now-iconic) Marlboro Man. A rugged cowboy that summed up everything about the quintessentially male American of the time.

The result? Sales jumped from $5 billion in 1955, to $20 billion just two years later in 1957, and they became the number one cigarette brand in the world. Not only that, but the Marlboro Man continued to be used commonly until 1999, and has been seen in Indonesia as recently as 2012.

I call it the shift, because as marketers our brief changed. We were no longer making brands memorable and selling products, we were:

1. Making brands memorable

2. Selling lifestyles.

Following this, there were key events that noone could avoid, resulting in the shaking up of, and ultimately the shaping, of our industry.

1993 - Launch of the World Wide Web

Internet use was growing at 20% per month during 1993–1995. By 2000 there were nearly 400 million users.

In 1998, when Google was launched, the term SEO was coined, and marketers had a new battlefield to fight on. Instead of making brands memorable in order to sell products, we now had to make brands discoverable in order to sell products.

First Banner Ad 1994

In these early days, there were three key tactics that marketers (or SEO’s, as they may now be known) found got them results, quickly:

• Keyword stuffing - Hiding target keywords in content so Google can see them and not users. Usually done by colouring the text white so it blends in with the page.

• Link schemes - Buying backlinks to your site

• Thin content - Useless content with sparse word count, ad riddled pages and a lack of credibility

In 2012, the Penguin update came along and put a stop to all of these what we now call “black hat tactics”. We had to pivot - how do we get results without the tactics we’d been relying on?

In 2013, Kaizen was founded on a mission to do exactly that - help brands rank higher in google by using ethical tactics, the main one of which was Digital PR.

2019 - I joined the industry

I started my career at a traditional PR agency in Nottingham, before joining Kaizen in 2020, meaning I’ve been on both sides of the debate. To me, the main difference I see was that as a PR I was working to make brands memorable, but as a Digital PR, I’m working to make brands discoverable. This means that each side comes with it’s own unique set of KPI’s and challenges, the key ones:

• Journalists - Traditional PR’s still hold their little black books, full of relationships they’ve been curtains - they know who to go to and for what. Whilst relationships are important in Digital PR also, it’s less about the shmoozing and more about the story. Sending a good story to a journalist you don’t know is more important than sending a bad story to a journalist you do know.

• Ideas - As a traditional PR I was creating stories about the brand, whether that’s new product launches or business news. As Digital PR’s we tend to create stories related to themes of the brand, so not as on-the-nose with the content. For a travel insurance client, for example, we can look into different destinations, cost of travel, reasons why people travel - not just whether they use travel insurance.

• Ways of working - As a traditional PR I was working with print, radio and tv journalists. They all like to plan, sometimes months in advance, meaning our stories had to be evergreen and we needed to fit to their timescale. They need content, fast, and that’s where us Digital PR’s come in.

2022 - AI became mainstream

In 1 month just after Chat GPT had launched, it had 57 million users, just two years later in 2024 there were around 250 million users. Perhaps unsurprisingly the younger generations are leading the uptake. 50% of young people have been directly influenced by LLM’s when making brand and product choices (source).

Even if you were able to avoid AI, it became difficult when Google launched AI Overviews in 2024 - they now feature in 99% of informational searches (source). This means our jobs have changed, again! We need to:

• Make brands discoverable to people

• Make brands discoverable to Google

• Make brands discoverable in AIO’s and LLM’s

This means as traditional PR’s and Digital PR’s, we need to work together to achieve the above. People are changing how, and where they search, but we need to make sure that they’re having the same brand experience regardless of where consumers find us.

But, how do we go about doing this? Like with any good strategy, it takes a three-pronged approach:

• Reframing success

• Adapting Strategies

• Testing and Learning

Reframing success

76% of AI Overview citations pull from top 10 pages (source) so if you already have a strong SEO strategy and are ranking on page one, you’re in a good place to be featured in AIO’s. However, this drops dramatically with just 12% of AI cited URL’s ranking on page one of Google for the original prompt (source). With the landscape of search changing, we need to begin reframing our success.

We’ve already seen the massive drop off in Click-through rates, suggesting these are no longer a valued KPI. Instead, make sure you’re keeping track of the bottom line (after all our key goal is to sell product) and monitor share of search - how many of your customers are searching you, and more importantly finding you wherever they do their searching.

Adapting Strategies

Evolving KPI’s means we need to have evolving strategies. Doing PR and Digital PR alone is no longer enough. We need to be working together and learning from each other in order to make our campaigns work as hard as possible.

Take a “bread and butter” PR campaign, such as the world’s healthiest cities, for example. Once upon a time as Digital PR’s we would create an index and outreach this to journalists in order to get backlinks and that would be enough. Now, we need to be pushing it further and thinking about the wider experience. Questions we now need to be asking ourselves include:

• How can I amplify this on social?

• Is there an experiential element to this campaign?

• Is there a great opportunity for additional video or photography assets to be made?

It’s all about taking what we know works, and making it work harder across different platforms to ensure we’re no longer working in silo. If we want customers to have the same brand experience regardless of where they find the brand, this starts with teams internally ensuring activity is aligned.

Testing and Learning

The way we work is changing. Fast.

Right now there really is no streamlined approach on how to tackle the changing landscape of search. But what we’re being great at as an industry is sharing what is, and isn’t working. We’re all in this together, so testing, learning and sharing is going to be key!

The ahrefs blog is a great source of insight and in-depth experiments that are showing where our industry is headed.

Charlotte Crowther, Digital PR Account Director, KAIZEN

___

Fancy a free brand audit? Book a short intro call!