1+1= advertising is better than PR?

I have known since the beginning of my college career that there is tension between the advertising and PR professions. This is common knowledge for most, or at least those in the industry or related ones. But I guess I just don’t get it. Maybe it’s my personality, not liking conflict and valuing others opinions and choice of profession. Maybe it’s because, for a brief moment, I thought about going into advertising. Or maybe it’s because I think that, as much as they deny it, advertising and PR must often work together to achieve their goals. But whatever my reasoning for not understanding this tension is, it’s still there.

Georg Kolb posted an interesting comment on his blog about a panel he recently attended. The event put on by TurnPRon was about, "Communication 2.0 - The Convergence of PR, Advertising, Media and the Consumer". The question was, "PR vs. Advertisers: Can't We All Just Get Along?". He had a lot of interesting things to say about the discussion that evening, but the part that struck me the most was a comment from another attendee. The woman, who would not share her name, said, “Web 2.0 is good for advertising, and I'm in advertising, so I'm all for advertising and against PR." What? First, who would go to a panel with professionals from both PR and Advertising and make a comment like that? According to Kolb there was no explanation that followed; this was it. I would like to know why she thinks Web 2.0 is good for advertising but not PR, and how this makes advertising better than PR.

After I read this, I was reminded of a history class I took during the 2004 presidential election. We were required to post a comment once a week on a class discussion board and comment on one person’s post. Most of the class members took the time to express their political views, which should have been a great way to jump start class discussion. However, most of the comments consisted of one person saying, “You should vote for Bush because he is better than Kerry,” or “I don’t know why anyone would vote for Bush, Kerry is so much cooler.” This was a college course but few people could actually explain why they were voting for a particular candidate over the other.

This seems to be the case with this woman. She is in advertising and Web 2.0 is good, so 1+1= advertising is better than PR? How so? I wonder how good she is at her job, because I’m not convinced. At the end of the day I wouldn’t take what this woman has to say too seriously unless she can start backing it up.