Interview with Osamu Iguchi "Now is the Time to Aim for the Fusion of Advertising and PR" Part 3

 

Part 3

Seeing award-winning works from overseas and successful domestic cases certainly fuels expectations for strategic PR within companies, which is gratifying for us PR professionals. However, to actually implement these, I believe it's crucial to embrace the concept of "fusing advertising and PR."

As mentioned at the outset, alongside heightened expectations from client companies, the creative advertising side is increasingly embracing the idea that "PR can deepen advertising communication." This is tremendously encouraging for us. When invited to participate from the planning stage, the depth of PR design improves dramatically compared to joining after everything except PR is finalized. PR sits at the same table as advertising, further upstream in the communication process. To put it even more boldly, we participate from the product development stage. I believe we will see more and more cases like this going forward.

Being part of the Dentsu Group gives us a significant advantage in achieving this seamless fusion and complementary relationship between advertising and PR. In terms of complementarity: advertising focuses on narrowing down the target audience, ultimately pursuing creative that can move even a single person. In contrast, PR's role is to create consensus among consumers as a collective—to generate "broadest common denominator empathy"—through the layered impact of multiple media and word-of-mouth (Figure 3). While these two approaches seem diametrically opposed, that very contrast is why they complement each other. To establish this framework, we've just launched a project with Dentsu Inc.'s creators to explore the optimal form of cross-departmental integration.

Beyond this, our ultimate goal is the integration of marketing communications and corporate communications. Leading companies are already taking action: reevaluating corporate advertising based on current sales activities, or cultivating loyal customers to the company itself to bolster sales efforts. Given the limits of product-only differentiation and consumers increasingly valuing a company's stance, this trend is certain to gain momentum. For more details, see my book, The Essence of Strategic PR: Five Perspectives for Practice (laugh).

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