Advertising is a paid promotion done by a company to boost the sales of their products and services. Publicity is an unpaid promotion which most of the times done by third party and it involves circulation of NEWS or information. Advertising is sub-part of promotion-mix. Publicity is sub-part of public relations.
Advertising is a permanent strategy that involves marketing and sales, whereas sales promotions have a limited time frame. Advertising appeals to the wants and needs of a target audience, and seeks to persuade prospective customers that your company is worthy of their attention.
Publicity is an unpaid promotion with the help of thirds parties such as media which shows the complete information about the product or brand by creating news or buzz.
- Advertisement is paid whereas publicity is not paid.
- Ads create short-term push whereas publicity is more long-lived effecting the brand image.
- Normally publicity is a one-way (irreversible) process.
| Advertising | Publicity |
|---|---|
| Advertising is a paid promotion done by a company to boost the sales of their products and services. | Publicity is an unpaid promotion which most of the times done by third party and it involves circulation of NEWS or information. |
| Advertising is sub-part of promotion-mix. | Publicity is sub-part of public relations. |
| The nature of advertising is impersonal and general. | The nature od publicity is both personal as well as impersonal. |
| Advertising is controlled by company itself. | Company has no control on publicity. It is controlled by third party. |
| The target audience of advertising is target buyers and customer. | The target audience of publicity is general public. |
| Advertising is initiated by company itself. | Publicity is done by media. |
| Advertising is expensive as it involves advertising expenses. | Publicity is inexpensive as it involves no or little money to make arrangements for publicity. |
| Advertising always has positive impacts as it is done to boost the sales of products and services sold by a company. | Publicity can have both positive as well as negative impacts as it can bring out both negative as well positive aspect of the product. |
| Advertising helps in building the image of the brand. | Publicity helps in creating goodwill and developing trust |
| The perception of audience is built only on the basis of sales promotions. | The perception of audience is built from genuine source of information. |
| Advertisements runs repetitively as long as company is paying for the advertisement. | Publicity is featured only once. |
| Creative and innovative ways are used to deliver a message through advertising. | Creativity plays an important role to create a news or buzz in media. |
| The credibility of advertising is low. | The credibility of publicity is comparatively high. |
| Advertising is sponsored activity. | Publicity is not a sponsored activity. |
| It is easy to measure the Return on investment. as one can measure it on the basis of increased sales. | It is difficult to measure the “Return on Investment” |
In a nutshell, we can say that advertising is beneficial when we are commercially launching something. However, publicity is not done for commercialization of anything.
Advertising is less trusted by people as it only mentions the positive points of the product and because of the impartial nature of publicity general people trust it more as they come to know about both negative as well as positive features of the product.
In the end, we can say that both advertising and publicity play an important role in the prosperity of a company.