As noted in Chapter 17, publicity is not the same thing as advertising. If you advertise in a publication or on a television channel, you generally provide the advertisement, pay for it, and in large part determine when and where and how it's going to appear. You have control over the ad (a plus), but you also pay for it (a minus).

Publicity works differently. First, you don't pay for it. For whatever reason, the media decides that you're newsworthy enough to include in one of their stories. Perhaps you've sent a news release to them about a quirky and fun charity challenge that your business is running, and they've agreed with you that it's something the public should know about it. Or maybe a reporter is researching a story about widgets, found your Web site, and now wants to interview you about them.

So — publicity is free, and it's positive exposure to the audience. What's not to like? Publicity's main disadvantage is that you have no control over it. You can't dictate when the story will run, what part of the newspaper it will appear in, or even whether it will run at all: If the paper runs out of space on the pages, stories get bumped. You also have no control over how you appear in the news story: You simply give your best quotes and hope that they're reported accurately and in context.

Publicity is much less predictable than advertising, and although it's free, the effort to catch the news media's attention can be time consuming. However, it comes with a powerful benefit: If you're quoted positively in a news story, it carries much more weight with the reader than any advertisement you'd place in the same media. The reporter, after all, is unbiased (or should be) and therefore trustworthy in the eyes of the readers, giving you more credibility.