By Robert Wheatley

My, my how far we’ve come…

(I know the headline above was first coined by someone else, but can’t remember the source this morning — a bit foggy today, I apologize. If anyone can identify the author please raise your hand).

I’m reading Chris Brogan’s blog today about the changing role of advertising and the interesting question about what works effectively these days – informing or entertaining? Chris goes on to mention David Ogilvy and an age when advertising served a useful purpose? Does it still? A recent post by Jeff Jarvis entitled “Advertising is Failure” suggests the evolution of ad creative sensibilities from inform to entertain has helped undermine the relevancy of this form of marketing communication.

Buy this book. By Ken Roman, one of the greatest leaders to emerge from David Ogilvy’s inner circle…

I grew up inside Ogilvy & Mather. Spent eleven wonderful years there during the era when Ogilvy was truly Ogilvy (all but one of my years there was prior to the hostile takeover by former Saatchi & Saatchi accountant Sir Martin Sorrell). We were exposed to David’s views and philosophy on a routine basis and brought up in a culture that was religiously respectful of consumer insight as a fundamental “table stake” in any form of effective communication.

David was still around when I entered the senior management ranks and I met him several times. One aside if you’ll indulge me: at the very first agency-wide management conference after WPP scooped up O&M, we were all treated to lunch at the headquarters dining room in New York. We were to hear an introductory talk from Sir Martin. David attended. We sat next to each other at lunch and during our conversation I explained to him our common Scottish heritage and my arrival in this world in Edinburgh, Scotland. Of course with American parents I have no accent. He said I was making it up just to get in his good graces. We laughed. We talked… great time with a marvelous and legendary figure whom I deeply respected and greatly admired.

Ogilvy’s early history and legacy as inspired by the long-form (copy-centric) ad theory was characterized as story telling that informs, perhaps even educates in order to motivate. The word “news” was also liberally applied to advertising’s creative role in those days. Which I always found interesting given that in the PR business “news” is the primary media field we work in and around on a daily basis. So we’re intimately familiar with what constitutes news and news-worthiness.

The commonality between ad and PR worlds simply stated: product news can be translated through both paid and unpaid (earned) vehicles. Combined the two forms of outreach are always better and more effective layered together than separated.

In more recent years advertising has gone the way of technique, art and entertainment. Image more so than information. Movie-making at its finest in an attempt to secure attention with messages that are more oblique and implied metaphorically than simply stated. Honesty, credibility and authenticity, three central strategic pillars of correct public relations strategy are more important than ever.

How would David operate in a world of content creation?

Nonetheless, the world has indeed changed. I wonder if he were around today how David would react to the current communications environment? What would he say about the role of ad and PR now that the consumer really runs the show and has ultimate access to every shred of information imaginable about products, services and the companies that provide them? And the ability to shut out any “marketing noise” not deemed useful, helpful or inherently believable.

I honestly think he might come to the conclusion that PR is the new advertising. I say this because news and useful information reign supreme in today’s outreach toolbox. And ironically the Internet presages the first global media platform that marries a content rich environment with the ability of brands and businesses to publish “news” and “education” — without having to navigate the filter of editors and editorial eccentricities.

Today we are content creators in PR as much as we are experts in navigating the private domain of editorial operations, decisions and outcomes.

Don’t get me wrong, coverage in earned media is critical, essential and relevant as much to brands as it is to consumers who consume news either online or off. The added layer of content creation allows us to craft communications in narrative and video form that fulfills the mission of education (and conversation) around useful information. It comes across with the same sensibilities as editorial media story telling. Feels like news. The difference: we construct the material and publish it. So PR may indeed be the new advertising. And word of mouth, the purest form of advocacy, may now be the new PR.

What would remain familiar I think to David is the unending devotion to consumer insight as the first step in any effort to divine the best way to talk to consumers. His genius as a copy writer steeped in the traditions of narrative story telling would feel right at home I believe in the new media world. Knowing his penchant for books and teaching, he may have already published the definitive work on the evolution of communications strategy in the new media age.

What do you think?