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Essay / Advertising and Publicity in Public Relations Campaigns - 865
Advertising and Publicity in Public Relations CampaignsIntroductionIn today's competitive market, organizations rely on their public relations departments to manage their public image global and arouse interest. The overall public image of any organization can have a huge impact on whether or not people will buy their product, invest in their stock, or want to be associated with the company itself as an employee or supplier. The main objective of a public relations campaign is to promote the organization to its key audiences and then develop and manage a positive image between the organization and its key audiences. In most cases, organizations will use a public relations campaign to generate publicity for the organization. In some cases, they will use advertising in the campaign to also generate publicity for a product launch. The purpose of this article is to discuss how LML Technologies used both advertising and publicity to promote the organization's name change and the branding of its products. I will also discuss the value of unpaid advertising as well as the relationship between advertising and publicity in public relations campaigns. LML Technologies uses advertising and publicity to promote new changes. Before January 2002, LML Technologies, the company I work for, was called Lease Marketing. LTD. The company developed and marketed leasing software called Lease Link and the company was known in the industry as "Lease Link". During 2001, Lease Link acquired two different software companies. One developed a business development application and the other a custom financing application. The reason for these acquisitions was to acquire additional software applications that complemented each other so that the company could package them into a suite environment in order to sell more systems. Once the products were integrated into a suite, senior management determined that the company could no longer be called Lease Marketing LTD or Lease Link because the applications were now more than just rental software and customers would be confused. Although the Lease Marketing LTD name and the Lease Link app are well known in the industry, we needed to rename the company as well as design a new "brand" name for the newly integrated suite of applications. This was necessary to re-establish the company in the industry as more than just a “leasing software” provider. To accomplish this, senior management hired an advertising and public relations firm to design not only a public relations campaign, but also an advertising campaign..