Lecture 3: Advertising and public relations
Art of rhetoric, or persuasive speaking ? important part of the ancient
Greek legal system. Used to present a case or grievance.Advertising and public relations both deal with rhetoric, or persuasion.
Advertising keeps media free of government control, but ethical conflicts can develop when a newspaper must write a story about an advertiser.
Advertising theories: stimulus-response, cognitive dissonance, advocacy.
Line between news and advertising has begun to blur in the last 20 years.
Ethical problem: line between news and advertising must be maintained for reasons of integrity.
Advertorial sections: look like news but they're actually advertisements.
Product placement ? especially common in the movies.
Target advertising: identifies and advertises aggressively to a specific demographic group. Ethical problems: children can be easily manipulated, certain audiences are not well understood by the target marketers.
Publicists provide essential things to journalists: access, information, exclusivity.
But publicists and journalists are fundamentally at odds. Publicist, like advertiser, is a practitioner of the art of persuasion.
Ethical problem associated with publicists: pseudo-events that make a good photo opportunity without providing any real news story.