For their part, ambitious PR people have long along drooled over the size and scope of big ad agency accounts. They think if I could have the budget for just one of those Super Bowl ads, I could create one of the biggest and best PR programs ever. As most veterans will attest, it doesn't happen that way. The budgets for the respective activities are in different parts of the company. All too often, PR is seen as a staff function, not necessarily carrying a specific return on investment.
Career paths are also quite separate.
The path to public relations is rarely the road to advertising, even though the skills are somewhat similar. There is a journalistic bent to public relations that is worlds apart from advertising's obsession with the creative product. Maybe in this round of consolidations, the new PR lord and master, WPP Group, will reconsider this notion. But it is doubtful because the devouring of the largest PR firms by the global ad agency networks has much more to do with economies of scale than standards of client service. Despite their differences, ad agencies and PR firms are essentially service businesses devoted to marketing.