Public Relations: Independent Function or Marketing Tool?

David Olajide (00:01):

It was supposed to be the most exclusive music festival the world had ever seen. Instead, it became one of the most public failures in modern event history. This is the story of influencers, empty tents, and a bonfire of credibility. Take a listen.

Farzana Baduel (00:24):

In late 2016, an idea took shape on an island in The Bahamas, an exclusive music festival. Unlike anything the world had seen by a festival, it would offer private jets, luxury villas, gourmet dining and performances from a-list artists. It was a brainchild of tech entrepreneur, Billy McFarland and rapper Ja Rule. But more than that, it was a branding exercise. An experience sold entirely through image and narrative. The campaign began with a blank orange tile on Instagram, no explanation, no lineup, just a wave of influencer endorsements. From the likes of Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid and Emily Rakowski. Thousands bought in. The FOMO was real. The market is seamless. Every post, every video, every promise was designed to stir emotion, not logic, and it worked. But while the facade grew shinier, the foundation cracked. There was no completed fillers, only disaster relief tents, no gourmet meals, just cold sandwiches, no real logistics, just optimism.

(01:34):

And as the festival date approached, reality fails to catch up with a fantasy. Contractors walked off the job, artists pulled out, flights still arrived. Then the reckoning festival goers landed expecting a curated paradise, and were met with chaos and luggage pulled in the dirt. Guests fought for mattresses. Food and water ran low with no infrastructure and no plan. The event unraveled in hours. The public turned on social media organizers turned silent. The news cycle turned savage. So was this a marketing failure? After all the campaign worked, it drove attention, clicks and conversations and conversions. But maybe that's where the failure began in the promises that didn't match the product. Or maybe it was a PR failure. No crisis plan, no messaging strategy. No one is communication when things went south, or maybe just, maybe it was one giant campaign failure, not two distinct breakdowns, but a single unraveling narrative. Marketing and PR.No longer separate silos worked together to build the myth. And when that myth collapsed, it wasn't clear where one function ended and the other began today on stories and strategies, was the fire festival a two alarm failure or just one big flame out? Because when the pitch burns out and the truth rolls in, who's really living it up?

(03:15):

My name is Farzana Baduel

Doug Downs (03:17):

And my name is Doug Downs. Today, Farzana and I do not have a guest. Instead, we're going to have our own little conversation about whether public relations is or isn't just part of the marketing department.

Farzana Baduel (03:31):

Thank God this is virtual as we may end up in fisticuffs now,

Doug Downs (03:35):

You bet.

Farzana Baduel (03:37):

And we're going to break this down. We're going to be as civilized as we possibly can. This is a very heated debate between marketers and prs. We are going to look at the purpose debate. We're going to look at influence versus image. We're going to look at the tactics, debate, media versus messaging, measurement, debate, impressions versus conversions, organizational debate. Who owns the message evolution debate then and now. So let's get stuck in,

Doug Downs (04:02):

And we won't keep score, but because we've broken it into those five pieces, feel free as you're going through it on that chapter, I'm going to give that one to Doug and maybe on that chapter, a half point to Farzana. Maybe that's the way because it's all subjective. Maybe that's the way you want to go. Chapter one, the purpose debate, influence versus image. And I'll go first arguing that really PR fits under the marketing umbrella. Farzana going the other way. PR and marketing, they're both trying to do the same thing at the highest level. They're both trying to shape public perception in service of a business. Objective, awareness, trust, sales, loyalty. Look at Apple for example. Every product launch is coordinated with a blend of public relations, media coverage and interviews and marketing ads. Retail influencer unboxing, my good friend in Chicago, Gini Dietrich, she has the peso model.

(05:05):

She coined that term and really she codified it, right? It's a practice that's been around for a long time. Peso, PESO, paid, earned, shared, owned. That clearly when you break them apart like that, places PR as one pillar of a broader marketing ecosystem. When a brand earns coverage in Forbes or goes viral on TikTok, this is not a separate win. It's part of the same campaign. ROI influence in 2025 is the new currency, and both PR and marketing are competing for it. On the same battlefield attention, whether it's a press release or a branded podcast, the goal is the same. Control the narrative, win the mind share, be the conversation at the dinner table, be what the community agrees on. Now you might argue the PR is about reputation, not revenue, but in reality, no C-Suite is funding reputation in a vacuum. Today's chief marketing Officer, today's CMO, is judged on brand trust and pipeline and PR contributes to both my friend that is not idealism, that's operations.

Farzana Baduel (06:25):

Now, I think we should start off with a clear definition of what public relations really is because there's a lot lack of clarity around it. People think sometimes it's synonymous with media relations and it isn't just happens to be one of the channels that we are known for. So if you look at the Chartered Institute of Public Relations, they have a definition which they say public relations is a strategic management of information that flows between an organization and its Publics plural. And I think the plural is really interesting because where marketers focus on the customer, us PR people, we focus on a multitude of stakeholders from government to journalists to the customer to employees, to local communities and so forth. And so public relations is ubiquitous and marketing, it overlaps the public relations. By no means is public relations a small part of the pie. Public relations is the pie.

(07:24):

What's been really interesting about the public relations industry is that we were a little bit like the poor cousins of marketing. We were pretty much just driving the lane of media relations for a really long time. And actually digital and the fragmentation of the media landscape opened up this whole new golden age for PR. And also actually what's really helped our industry is stakeholder capitalism. And what that basically means is that the focus wasn't completely always for organizations on the selling on the customer, but actually on a multitude of stakeholders where actually capitalism was, the evolution of capitalism was not just to think about the shareholder, but to think about the shareholder, the customer, the journalists, the government, the local communities, the employees, the suppliers. And so stakeholder Capitalism has brought in this new era for public relations because actually to sell a product, people don't just care about the marketing. They care how do you treat your staff? How do you treat your suppliers? How do you deal with government policy? So people actually care a lot more than just product price, place promotion, which in my opinion is incredibly redundant because now people also care about an organization's purpose and maybe four Ps needs to change to five Ps. But I think things have shifted.

Doug Downs (08:41):

I'd love Pie. My wife served pie for Father's Day dinner last night. It was a wonderful part of the meal.

Farzana Baduel (08:49):

So if we look now and moving on, because definitely the PR industry has changed, it has ironically become more influential because of digital fragmentation of communication channels and also because the idea that the activist consumer cares more than just what it looks like, what the product benefits are and what the cost is. And that is given a huge new area for us to operate in. But if we look at, for instance, the tactics debate and we look at how do we approach the tactics debate and PR comes from a history of earned first. And we're now in slightly uncomfortable waters where we are still operating in earned first, but we are also operating in pay to play. And I think really difficult because prs and marketeers we're swimming in each other's lanes. And that's what's becoming increasingly confusing because marketeers pay for attention, earn it. But now we we're paying for it as social media algorithms now make organic engagement a thing of the past and we are forced to put money behind our messaging.

Doug Downs (10:01):

And a lot of earned media coverage, especially local publications, you pay your way in. Maybe that was always the case, but you bought an ad and hey, you got a story about your thing.

Farzana Baduel (10:14):

Well, I think it's become even worse because I think now what's happened is really it's so sad about the local media because now the local media, they don't have the advertising budgets that they used to have because all the advertising budgets have left local media and gone into social media advertising. So now the local media, A, they are reduced in terms of numbers. They used to be a brilliant purposeful platform for local issues and for building community and also as a training ground for journalists who then moved on to the nationals. And now the local media is pretty much reduced as well as they also have got, I think a handful of staff compared to having significant teams in the past. And what does that mean? That means now that they are reliant upon sponsored content. And so our relationship as PRs with journalists have changed, whereas before they outgunned us prs in terms of their resources. And now actually in some countries you have 10 prs for each journalist. And so we are the ones now we're the resources. And so we're the ones who have much easier time placing pre-written content and so therefore opening the door to sponsored content. So that's where things get blurry between us prs and marketeers now.

Doug Downs (11:35):

Yeah, and I agree, the world is turned. The winds have shifted and the toolkits I would say have merged. Press releases are written like SEO blog posts these days. Influencer deals blend product placement with brand narrative. For an example, Gym Shark's rely heavily on influencer storytelling, which is a classic PR technique. Hello, that's 1985 PR.But it all rules into performance marketing metrics. That's what's changed. PR now lives on platforms where paid, earned and owned media overlap completely. One tweet or post whatever you want to call it, can lead to a media article which gets shared, promoted, repurposed in email campaigns. That's not PR or marketing. It's campaign strategy. Media relations is no longer about building relationships with journalists. It's about managing narratives in multi-channel environments. Netflix's campaigns for shows like Wednesday or beef combine interviews, memes, paid teasers and fan reactions seamlessly integrated by one marketing team saying PR and marketing use different tactics is like saying graphic design isn't marketing that it's just a skill within the function.

(13:02):

Okay, alright, now you scored home who won chapter two. Let's move on to the measurement debate, which is chapter three impressions versus conversions. I'll begin. Just because PR isn't always tied to direct conversions doesn't mean it escapes accountability executives like dashboards. I call them bathroom readers because back in my day you printed the dashboard out. These days they look on their iPad or their phone and I know where they're sitting and looking at these things, giving it two minutes of their time. Modern PR agencies like Edelman and Weber Shandwick now provide full funnel analytics and sentiment scoring because clients demand it. Think about crisis PR.If your response stops a stock from falling, that's quantifiable. If it restores consumer confidence, that's measurable. After the Boeing 7 37 max crisis, media narratives were managed aggressively to stabilize trust. But those stories were analyzed alongside of ad spend. PR outcomes like brand sentiment, share of voice and media reach. Now live inside marketing analytics suites like HubSpot and Meltwater, if it's on a marketing dashboard, it's a marketing function, plain and simple. I'm not dismissing the qualitative, I'm just saying in a world driven by KPIs and OKRs objectives and key results, PR can't pretend that it's untouchable.

Farzana Baduel (14:32):

Listen, marketers have always had one up on us PRs historically because they had access to sales data. So when

Doug Downs (14:41):

They've done better,

Farzana Baduel (14:43):

Well, not really. What's happened with marketeers is, for instance, if they want to sell a product in a supermarket and they would measure what the sales of that product is, before they would get really good sales data from the supermarkets and they would measure a before and after campaign. And it was very binary. It was very easy to understand what the ROI. Now with US prs, it was always historically quite difficult because what did we have to play with? We had media relations where we had to liaise with gatekeepers and control was not entirely ours. We were one of multitude of factors that determined what the outcome was, including news agenda as well as the editorial agenda and the journalists response and what else, what other stories you had to compete on the day. And then we had events and we had awards and speaker opportunities and public affairs.

(15:37):

So we had these sort of areas that we could work in, but it was very difficult to get data. But now things have changed. I mean now, and that's why as an industry we're growing up because for the first time we can track sentiment. We can understand that when we push a message out, what the sentiment analysis is, we can isolate the different types of stakeholders and analyze the sentiment over a period of time. Regarding crisis, nowadays, you've got amazing tools that can let you know actually predict even if the crisis on social media, depending upon if influencers are picking it up and how long they're talking about it, if it's going to be a sustained crisis over a number of days or if it's going to sort of fizzle out and therefore does it warrant a statement or just ignoring it. And so now we actually have a lot more data than we used to have.

(16:25):

I think what we're seeing is that we're seeing a more even playing field between marketers and prs. Back in the past, we would be dismissed by particularly the C ffo as this is a waste of money. We don't have any metrics. I mean, I come from an accounting background. I do understand the mentality of how do you sign off on budgets when it's really difficult to quantify. And so we came up with these things. We came up with these sort of metrics that didn't make much sense, like a VE advertising value equivalent. And we would take whatever the cost of advertising is and times it by three and a half. And of course, without a doubt, everyone knows that a really good place editorial is worth infinitely more than an advert. I mean, that's just human nature. Fair enough. We would instinctively know that enough. But now I do think things are changing. We have access to the software. So I think that our marketing brethren should be looking at us with renewed eyes, that we have the data, we have the influence, and we operate across a multitude of stakeholders and we take a very macro perspective, whereas marketers will take almost a sort of a siloed micro perspective. And so that's I think something to ponder about.

Doug Downs (17:43):

I would just say, look who's marketing now.

Farzana Baduel (17:45):

Yeah. The next piece I wanted to talk about was the organizational debate. Who owns the message?

Doug Downs (17:55):

Chapter four.

Farzana Baduel (17:56):

Yeah, chapter four. So let's go into this. So this is really interesting because historically a lot of prs would not be included at the beginning of a campaign. You would have the CMO come up with a campaign. The CMO would often A, they'd have a C-suite place in the organization. PRS wouldn't be C-suite. Often boards would have somebody with a marketing background, not with a PR background or reputation background. So in the recent history, prs weren't at senior positions. And what would often happen is that they would come up with a campaign and PR would often be an afterthought where right at the end, once everything was decided, budgets allocated, somebody in the room would say, oh, hold on, what about our PR cousins? And someone would say, oh yeah, just throw them this brief and tell them exactly what to do. And so they would fling this little bone to us and then we would just be task takers.

(18:54):

We'd say, oh, yes sir, let's just get on with it. It was often a sir. And then we would just often just get on with it and just execute it. And we weren't invited to think we were invited to do. And then when we inevitably didn't get what they expected because they don't understand how PR works, we were then just spent the rest of our time defending the results. And it was quite a sorry, state of affairs for us. But now you do have chief communication officers, you do have communication experts sitting on boards, and you are beginning to see a shift of an understanding because of crisis, because that a crisis can go around the world instantaneously and can damage and tank a company's stock price. It is really real reputational damage. And that's why now PRS are invited more to the boardroom than invited to the C-suite. They are increasingly brought in for their thinking. And I think there's also an issue in companies and organizations that a lot of people don't understand the difference between marketers and prs. They often think it's synonymous. And that's why a lot of organizations are structured in a way where they think that the PR should report to the marketers because they don't understand the difference. If you look at a lot of the CEOs, they tend to be from finance backgrounds.

Doug Downs (20:18):

Yeah. That said, though, I think I can give you examples where there are very successful companies where it all silos up to the chief marketing officer, not a siloed head of comms. For example, Salesforce, Spotify, Nike, they all run integrated comms strategies under marketing leadership. They don't separate reputation from growth. They consider them synonymous. And everything you just talked about is a very specific disciplinary function, but it fits under the marketing umbrella when your crisis response brand campaign and executive comms need to sound consistent, one team, one team has to own the voice. And that's a really important argument. Remember when Patagonia's CEO transferred ownership of the company to a trust that wasn't just a PR stunt, it was a coordinated brand statement woven through every customer touchpoint. Having PR sit outside of marketing is a pre-digital relic. It made sense when media relations was faxed and marketing meant billboards, but hello, 2010 called, it wants its strategies back. Now. Everything lives online. It's archived and it's analyzed in the same channels. Farzana, you see separation as independence. I see it as inefficiency.

Farzana Baduel (21:42):

Do you know, I think it's really interesting when people say, oh, well, in such and such organization that's so successful, they have them together. Have you thought about that? If they did have them as separate functions and they understood the difference, how much more successful they could be?

Doug Downs (21:59):

Okay, chapter five, and if you have the scores two to two, I really think this is the chapter where you come out on my side, this is the evolution debate. The then versus now, what was once traditional PR managing press, writing speeches, handling crises is now part of a multi-platform storytelling discipline. Look at how brands like Duolingo use social media. The brand personality lives across earned media and TikTok antics. That's all within marketing. The belief that PR is distinct because it's more pure or less salesy for that's romantic. It's not realistic. Even in nonprofits or government, PR teams align to audience reach, engagement goals and strategic narrative. That's marketing campaigns aren't run in silos anymore. You don't launch a new product with PR one week and let's do the marketing next week. That's not how it works. Look at Spotify wrapped how it fuses. User data design, media coverage, social buzz, that's a single campaign. It's not a PR marketing relay race. One doesn't hand off to the other. It all happens together. It's cohesive. Bottom line where the brand gets credit or blame. No one is asking if it was PR or marketing that was behind the curtain. They just see the result. And that result is built by one team with many tools and public relations is an important one of them.

Farzana Baduel (23:38):

You know what the difference is really between marketing and pr? It's a little bit like imagine being in a room and there's a singer singing away and a marketing aspect. A marketing lens is the singer is only singing to one person in the room, not making eye contact with anyone else, just that one person ignoring everybody else in the room. Now, if it was a PR person singing on stage, they will be looking at everybody in the room. They will be looking at, they'll be reading the room, they will be making eye contact with everybody in the room. And what's the end result is that the PR will have higher engagement than the marketeer. Because the marketeer, everything they think and do is all about the financial aspect of transaction they're selling. And as prs, we look broader than that because ultimately we understand that reputation is not the result of one campaign. It's a result of an infinite number of campaigns that are weaved together through the thread of trust and understanding. Ultimately, what makes PR different than marketing is very simple. We are inclusive of all stakeholders and marketing are only focused on selling. And that's why PR is broader than marketing. And I predict in the future, marketers will be reporting to prs.

Doug Downs (25:10):

Oh gosh. Oh gosh, that's a reach. Wow, really?

Farzana Baduel (25:17):

Oh yes. And we'll do all the thinking. And towards the end of the campaign we'll say, oh, isn't there a marketing person we should be thinking about and perhaps giving them a brief?

Doug Downs (25:27):

I love it. Well, I hope you kept score at home. If you did it by chapter, somebody won three to two, right? Because you can't have a tie, hopefully let us know because we'd love to hear about that. Here are the top three things that Farzana you made me think about today. Number one, a broader multi-stakeholder view of PR. Farzana you emphasize that PR isn't just about the customer or media. It involves government, employees, local communities, and other stakeholders. Rooted in stakeholder capitalism is your point. Number two, historical marginalization of PR.Amen. I can't argue with that. You offered insight into how PR has historically been left out of campaign planning, often brought in last minute, and expected to spin decisions that have already been made. You argued for strategic inclusion of PR at the executive level, especially post COVID. I can't argue with any of that. And number three, the evolution of PR tactics and data capabilities. You outlined how PR has grown up. Its gotten to the big boy or big girl table now using sophisticated sentiment analysis, predictive crisis tools and stakeholder tracking, countering the old argument that PR lacks measurable RO. I

Farzana Baduel (26:42):

Love that. Thank you so much, Doug. I wanted to just serve back the top three things that Doug made me think about today. The argument for integration under marketing. Doug made a strong case that in today's digitally unified landscape, PR and marketing are tools in one toolkit, not separate functions. He emphasized campaign cohesion. Number two, examples of successful unified models. Doug brought in examples like Nike, Salesforce, and Spotify, which run integrated comm strategies under marketing leadership. He uses these to support his claim that PR does not need to stand apart to be strategic. Number three, realism about business metrics and expectations. Doug reminded us that executives demand KPIs and that PR must fit into dashboard friendly metrics like sentiment, reach and ROI. His framing acknowledged prs, qualitative value, but stressed, operational pragmatism in executive decision making.

Doug Downs (27:44):

Perfect. And I still love pie. It was a wonderful part of the family dinner.

Farzana Baduel (27:48):

Yeah.

Doug Downs (27:50):

If you'd like to send us a message, you got a few points that you want to make. You can send them direct to farzana. There are a few ways you can do that in the show notes at the very top, you can just text us through that link. Tell us who won. We'll be keeping score. You can also send us an email info@storiesandstrategies.ca, or we're real easy to find on LinkedIn.

Farzana Baduel (28:12):

Now. Stories and Strategies is a co-production of Curzon Public Relations, JGR Communications, and Stories and Strategies, podcasts. If you aren't following this podcast on your favorite podcast app, why not? And a big, big thank you to our co-producers, Emily Page and David Olajide. And lastly to us, a favor forward this episode to one friend, and thank you so much for listening.