Answer
The following are the differences between advertising and publicity:
- Advertising is to advertise a product or service of a company, for commercial purposes. Publicity is to publicize a product, service or company to provide information.
- Advertising is what a company says about its own product, but Publicity is what others says about a product.
- There is a huge investment to be made for advertising a single product however publicity does not require such kind of investment.
- The key persons behind advertising are the company and its representatives. Conversely, Publicity is done by a third party which is not related to any company.
- Advertising is under the control of the company which is just opposite in the case of publicity.
- Advertising repeatedly occurs to grab the attention of the customers while Publicity is done only one-time act.
- Advertising is always customer focused, i.e. the more creative the advertise, the more are the customers attracted to it while publicity is not done keeping such things in mind.
- As advertising is done to promote a brand or a product so the credibility and reliability are relatively less in comparison to publicity, where the opinion comes from an independent source.
- Advertising always speaks the goodness about a product, to persuade the target audience to buy it. In contrast to publicity, it is unbiased, and so it will speak the reality, no matter whether it is goodness or illness.
It’s important to keep in mind that (good) publicity is more effective than advertising, because someone else is quoting you and/or writing about you. Advertising, on the other hand, is controlled by you, and thus less credible because you are “writing” or otherwise providing information about yourself and your firm. Not objective nor without self-aggrandizement, I think most would agree.
