Joseph Turow. Media Today : An Introduction To Mass Communications. 3^rd Edition – Part Five : Advertising and Public Relations

In this book, Joseph Turrow explained that the media has spawned the development of new technology to the mass media, namely the mass media in the world of advertising and public relations.

Mass communication is a process in which media organizations create and disseminate a message to the audience a lot of (public). These media organizations will disseminate the messages that will influence and reflect the culture of a society, then this information will they present simultaneously in widely diverse audience. This makes the media become part of one powerful institution in society. In future communications, mass media into a single authority to select, produce a message, and deliver it to audiences.

Advertising is an attempt to introduce a product / service to the public / consumer in order to market or sell. Where advertising is one of the stages in the marketing strategy plays a very important and vital. Advertising must be more than just provide information to the public but must be able to persuade people to behave in such a manner in accordance with the company’s marketing strategy in order to print sales / profit.

While public relations is the management of special functions that help build and maintain a joint communication, understanding, support, and cooperation between organizations and the public, involving management issues, assist management to identify and respond to public opinion, to explain and emphasize the responsibility of management to serve the public interest, help management to stay abreast of and effectively utilize change, useful as early warning system to help anticipate trends, and using sound research and proper technique in communication as the main tool.

In my opinion, both advertising and public relations each has a central role in mass communication.

Advertising helps people to promote their products to the masses. These can be either advertising in mass media such as print media, or electronic media. In my opinion, the scope of coverage of advertising in influencing the larger mass, because the spread of information to various audiences simultaneously mass. Just as when we make a television advertisement in electronic media. When we created the ad began airing, then the entire television audience simultaneously and with a wide range of information or product to find out what we want to convey. Similarly, the use of print media.

Planners must understand the advertising messages reach, frequency and impact of each of the major media before deciding to choose which media they will use. There are a number of factors to consider in selecting the media, the media habits of target customers, product properties that are relevant to the selected media, the type of messages (messages with different types often require different media), and cost.

Effective advertising messages effectively determine whether the ad was launched and received satisfactory responses from the audience. Reality shows, most television viewers for example, decided to change the channel when ads are shown. So marketers need to be observant to choose and determine your advertising message is delivered. Ads that are presented should be a treat imaginative, interactive, entertaining and useful.

While I think public relations has its own role in mass communication. Public relations can be either messenger speeches, sermons, or so forth. Public relations to communicate the message or information directly to the public. This is the great challenge of a public relations, where he should be able to create the precise words that can influence people (audience) as well as in the same time.

Public relations is one part of one same breath in the organization, and must give the identity of the organization with appropriate and correct and be able to communicate so that the public have confidence and have a clear and correct understanding of the organization. In short we can say that the function of public relations is to maintain, mengembangtumbuhkan, keep the communication reciprocity required in handling, fix any problems, or minimize the problem.

Advertising and public relations in my opinion basically have the same goal in general, namely to influence the target audience will be a message to be conveyed. Both are equally effective. The difference is, if the audience of advertising could not provide direct feedback, while the public relations may get it.