The PR-ad-marketing quibble

Try as I might to keep from getting hooked on "Mad Men," I've finally succumbed. There's something irresistible about an era when cigarettes and alcoholic "refreshments" were acceptable at office meetings any time of day.

But at one such gathering, something other than the Camels and Gibsons caught my attention. It was a pitch to a client from uber-advertising man Don Draper, which went something like: "If you don't like what's being said, change the conversation. ... PR people understand the concept but can't execute."

The slight toward public relations was amusing but not the most interesting part of the line. Rather, it was the larger lesson that is germane to both industries some 40 years after the meeting supposedly took place: Distilled to their common essence, there's little difference between the goals of public relations, advertising, marketing, and even journalism.

There has been much debate about social media's place in these perceived disciplines, but the fact is that such concerns matter only to the people who work in them. It's all information--once packaged and delivered differently but now with increasingly blurred distinctions. Semantic preoccupation does nothing but distract from the task at hand.

For years as a news editor I tried to explain to reporters that the competition was no longer other publications or websites; instead, the threat was digital advertising, marketing campaigns, fan forums, and sponsored blogs.

Why? Because these other types of media carried much of the same basic information we were trying to convey, but often took a more succinct and entertaining form. It's the same reason that "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" has eclipsed "legitimate" TV news programs. People can laugh while still keeping up with the headlines.

Let's take a closer look at the "Mad Men" example, which was based real-life events. The builders of Madison Square Garden faced huge opposition in the 1960s over their intent to demolish Penn Station's historic Beaux Arts building. The fictional firm Sterling Cooper was bought in to change public opinion over the controversial project.

Sterling Cooper was an advertising company but, as Draper suggests, the job could been done just as well by a PR firm that knew what it was doing. The same is true of marketing specialists and even newspapers not shy to embark on crusades for the sake of circulation or business interests, if not nobility.

In the end the landmark was razed, the arena built, and the outcry drowned out. And no one remembers the name of the agency that handled the campaign, let alone which industry it was in.