PR vs Advertising: Where Should Founders Spend?

It's a fair question, especially when budgets are tight: should you put money into ads or into PR? The honest answer is that they do different jobs, and the smartest founders use both deliberately.

Advertising buys attention. PR earns trust.

With advertising, you control the message and you pay for every impression. The moment you stop paying, it stops. With PR, you give up some control, since a journalist or host frames the story, but you gain something ads can't buy: third-party credibility. Decision-makers know you paid for the ad. They know you didn't pay the journalist.

That's why 73% of B2B decision-makers say a company's thought leadership is a more trustworthy way to judge its capabilities than its marketing (Edelman/LinkedIn, 2024).

Press compounds. Ads evaporate.

An ad campaign is a faucet: useful while it runs, gone when it stops. A piece of earned media is an asset: it lives on Google and YouTube, gets clipped and reshared, and keeps building credibility for years. Reputation, after all, accounts for an estimated 63% of a company's market value (Weber Shandwick, 2020).

So where should you spend?

• Need a fast, controllable spike (a launch, an event, a deadline)? Advertising earns its place.
• Building a durable reputation and want trust that lasts? That's PR's job, and it's the one that compounds.

For most founders building for the long term, the question isn't ads or PR. It's making sure the trust-building work, the part that actually changes how people see you, isn't being neglected.

---

Curious what an earned-media strategy would look like for you? Let's talk.