Who is better; PR, Advertising, or Marketing?

I understand a good amount of communications principles. I may not have the valid experience to make any major claims, but I have a lot of knowledge from the research.

If I were at a PR, marketing, or advertising agency, depending on the client I would want to know the paths that other agencies have taken with their promotional mix. If I am at a marketing company I would want to incorporate certain ideas that an ad agency has utilized for that client. I would also want to create awareness so that it would fall in line with a PR company’s goals. It would also be good to understand these specifics for differentiation so that one party can be more specific in its creative process. I am only one person, but if I were to work at any of these places I would make sure I would be functioning in a well oiled Branding Network. With enough experience I should be able to start my own one day, but I’m still only 23.

There are many parent companies for these creative communications shops. There is; WPP, out of Dublin Ireland; Havas, which is based in France; Publicis Groupe, which is another French company;  Interpublic group (IPG), which is American; and Omnicom, which is also American. There are many other successful individualized firms that are not part of these parent companies, but for the most part from my research these five seem to be some of the top dogs in the communications spectrum.

It has me thinking if there are at least hundreds of companies under each company shouldn’t there be some sort of way to communicate to each other. I would imagine there is a platform that exists like this, but it may not be formalized. If I were a freelance advertiser I would definitely like to contact the PR person or agency that would be handling that company to see which path I should take to keep in line of the companies’ message. There is always a way to tarnish a companies image. There would not be an Axe-style commercial for Disney; it just won’t fall in line with their family friendly image.

A good example of this might be an obvious one to some communications professionals. But the whole issue where Oprah told people about the free grilled chicken from KFC was a bad Idea. This all goes back to my view of the Oprah effect, where if she tells the public about something it comes back a million fold. This was a mix up of poor advertising techniques and an unprepared Public Relations move.

I understand that if you advertise something as free or extremely cheap, you better make sure you have enough of that product on hand. Your staff better be extra prepared, kind of like how they ask people to come to work early on Black Friday.

After reading The Brand Gap by Marty Neumeier, I made major realizations, that a lot of companies as well as agencies have more communication problems amongst themselves, let alone with other agencies. There seems to be a lackluster approach to combining business strategy and the creative side of things. The two rarely meet, and when they do egos are on the line.  So if an individual agency or company has issues like this, what kind of errors are they making when it comes to understanding the other side of the communications in the company? One thing I hope is true that my views do not go unnoticed.

So when I ask the question who is better? I will say neither is better, becasue if they all are competing then they are not working together to help out the brand.