Why Advertising and PR Must Walk Together in Brand Building

Early in my career, I sat in a boardroom with a client’s leadership team the morning after a story broke that no one had seen coming. Their advertising was still running with polished, reassuring messaging. It was everything a premium brand should say about itself. But the newsroom was asking a very different set of questions, and nothing that anyone in the room said matched the tone of those ads. That gap, between what the brand was paying to say and what the world was actually hearing about it, is the moment I understood that advertising and PR cannot be run as two separate departments with two separate stories to tell. Under every circumstance, no matter the reporting structure, advertising and PR must work together.

Advertising buys attention because it is paid, controlled, repeatable, and placed exactly where a potential customer might come across it. You decide the message, the medium, and the location or moment it appears. PR earns credibility through journalists, through third parties, through the kind of validation a brand simply cannot purchase. I have spent years looking closely at the interaction of one with the other, building campaigns that need paid amplification to land, and sitting with C-suite leaders during crises where the absence of a consistent, well-managed narrative turned something manageable into something reputational. The lesson has stayed with me: a brand’s story must be singular, no matter how many teams or channels are telling it.

I think often of the work I have done with airports – where reputation is tested daily in full public view – flight delays, safety concerns, passenger frustration – all playing out on the same day the brand’s advertising is telling travellers to expect a seamless experience. There’s something about a poor experience at an airport that people take extremely personally. In those rooms, you learn quickly that no amount of clever media spend can undo a narrative that PR hasn’t shaped and protected in advance. The advertising can only be as credible as the PR groundwork sitting underneath it.

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The same principle holds true even in the gentler, more optimistic work of building a new brand from scratch. While writing brand voice for a founder just starting out – someone with a genuine story, a real legacy, something worth saying – I find myself constantly asking: is the advertising claim something PR could also stand behind, unprompted, if a journalist called tomorrow? If the answer is no, the brand has a gap it hasn’t noticed yet. The advertising and PR team must necessarily subscribe to the same key messages.

Today, I am clear that advertising and PR cannot be sequential. One cannot write the ad campaign, then hand it to a PR team to “support”. They need to be built together, sharing the same messaging framework, the same calendar, and the same accountability for how the brand is actually perceived, not just how it is promoted. PR teams need to understand paid media timing, and advertising teams need to understand what earned coverage is already doing quietly, so the paid spend isn’t repeating work already done – or worse, contradicting it.

I have watched brands with strong PR foundations weather difficult moments with a kind of resilience that no advertising budget alone can buy. Trust built over time through earned credibility simply does not evaporate the way attention bought through media spend can.

Brand building, at its heart, is reputation management played over the long term. Advertising and PR are two instruments in the same orchestra. Play them out of sync, and the audience notices, especially at the worst possible moment. Play them together, and the brand becomes not just visible, but believable and credible.

– Written by Archana Muthappa, a Strategic Corporate Communications Business Leader with over 25 years of experience. Currently serving as Chief Operating Officer, AI & Beyond.