The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR

I am currently writing my thesis on the role of PR in the communication of luxury brands, and have a whole chapter on how PR has taken over the market that was previously held by advertising and marketing. I have found this book to be extremely helpful, full of real life examples and it is extremely easy to read. It was so good I couldn't put it down, and finished it overnight. For anyone who is not familiar with the area or for experts who have worked in the area for years, this book is an excellent read, very thorough and enlightening.

The Fall of Advertising and The Rise of PR is a great starter for those who have no idea what PR really is and how it differs from advertising. The Authors use examples we see everyday to show how advertising works, and does not work. I would not buy this book though. Many examples are given to illustrate one point and I found myself skipping over large parts of the book. The books easy to read language make it very easy to read through quickly. I would recommend finding this book at a library or a borrowing a copy rather than buying.

This highly readable and interesting and insightful book should be compulsory reading for anyone involved in deciding where a company's marketing funds are spent. The authors speak some serious truths about advertising and how it is misused and overused and about public relations and how it is under-used. Here is the book's essential idea: advertising can't buy you a brand identity, and if you try to spend your way to it, you will just be throwing your money away. The book explains why and along the way you pick up how to build a brand, what advertising is designed for, and learn a lot about ad agencies and how they believe that their job begins and ends at being creative without regard to whether the ad agency's product makes the client money. It supplies the reader an ample supply of helpful hypotheses, graphs, stats, and insight, into the world of Advertising and PR. I found this book to be both educational and helpful. It's a fun read, and if it doesn't make you sit back and take a long look at your own strategic thinking, maybe you should read it again.

This book opens your eyes to the hidden truth of advertising. Ries & Ries...brilliantly written work.

Most of us in marketing have grown up on a steady diet of Al Ries and Jack Trout. From their first foray into publishing with "Positioning" in the 70's, these guys have set new paradigms for how we think about the work we do and given us new insights into better ways to serve our clients. This book is no exception.Like 'Positioning,' 'Marketing Warfare,' and 'Bottom Up Marketing,' which preceded it, this book by Al Ries is an oversimplification, BUT that doesn't detract from the basic premise that advertising can guarantee us placement, frequency and position, but it can't give us credibility.I read the other reviews posted here with interest. Based on the response of the other reviewers, I guess we all take ourselves a little too seriously. The point of the book is to focus on our radical over-emphasis on the tool of advertising over the tool of PR, and the apparent inability of advertising to free itself from the campaign thinking that often does more harm than good for the clients that we are trying to represent.It's a fun read, and if it doesn't make you sit back and take a long look at your own 'strategic' thinking, maybe you should read it again.