In the 1920′s there was a lot of foundational work done in PR and Advertising that set the stage for market acceptance of the two industries. This early disciplinary work enabled both industries to take advantage of the new channels that developed in the late 40′s and 50′s when Radio and Television became household appliances and forever changed…. well everything.

Over the last 15 years we’ve seen the Internet fragment Marketing nearly beyond recognition. Besides PR and Advertising you have Direct Marketing, Digital Marketing, Interactive Marketing just to name a few and then you have variations of each of these plus hundreds of touch points and overlap between all of these disciplines.

But large corporations have typically had two internal Marketing groups; PR and Advertising (I’m excluding product marketing and sales on purpose). Each company has struggled with where all the sub-disciplines should fall and now with social media blurring the lines between all of these even further I have to ask if it still makes sense to have separate departments?

I think over the next 5-10 years we’re going to see a huge roll-up happening inside large corporations with there no longer being PR on one side and Advertising on the other. It will just be Marketing. I personally think this will be a good thing in the end but it’s going to painful for PR and Advertising agencies during the process.

[Update] T-Mobile (a client) has even done away with internal vs external comms. PR and HR (as related to communications) are focused on “vertical” - B2B, Channel, Corporate - and are responsible for communicating news, changes and announcements both ways.

photo credit dno1967

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