The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR

**Author:** Al Ries

**Estimated Reading Time:** 2 hours 15 minutes

**What You'll Learn:**

- Why advertising fails at building brands and what actually works - How to use PR to create credibility and trust with consumers - Why being first in a new category matters more than being better - How to choose names, spokespeople, and stories that generate media attention - How to transition from PR-driven brand building to advertising-driven maintenance

**Who This Book Is For:**

Entrepreneurs launching new products, marketing professionals frustrated with declining advertising returns, business owners seeking cost-effective brand building strategies, and anyone who wants to understand how brands like Starbucks, Red Bull, and Amazon achieved prominence without massive advertising budgets.

Every year, companies around the world pour billions of dollars into advertising campaigns that fail to move the needle. They craft clever slogans, produce expensive commercials, and buy premium media placements. Yet most of these efforts vanish without a trace, leaving brands no stronger than before. Why does this happen? Why do so many well-funded advertising campaigns produce so little? Al Ries offers a provocative answer. Advertising, he argues, has lost its power to build brands. It is not that advertising has become useless. It still serves a purpose. But that purpose is no longer creation. The role of advertising has shifted to maintenance. The creative force in brand building now belongs to public relations. This is a difficult message for many business leaders to accept. For decades, advertising has been seen as the engine of brand growth. Companies built entire marketing departments around advertising budgets. Agencies rose to prominence on the strength of their creative campaigns. The assumption was simple: if you want to build a brand, you advertise. But Ries points to a growing body of evidence that contradicts this assumption. Look at the brands that have achieved the most dramatic success in recent decades. Microsoft, Starbucks, Amazon, Google, Red Bull, and countless others built their reputations with minimal advertising. They relied instead on word of mouth, media coverage, and the power of being first in a new category. The reason is rooted in human psychology. People do not trust advertising. They know it is paid for. They know it is biased. They know it is designed to sell them something. When a company says its product is great, consumers shrug. Of course they would say that. But when a journalist writes about a product, when a friend recommends it, when an expert endorses it, the message carries weight. That is credibility. And credibility is the foundation of brand building. The implications of this shift are profound. It means that companies need to rethink how they launch products. It means that marketing budgets…