The New Rules of Marketing & PR

Now in its ninth edition, this international bestseller by marketing strategist David Meerman Scott argues that the internet has fundamentally transformed how organizations reach customers. Scott contends that the old model, built on expensive advertising, media gatekeeping, and large sales forces, has been replaced by a new paradigm in which any organization can publish content directly to buyers at the precise moment they are searching for solutions. The book is organized into three parts: an overview of how the web changed the rules of marketing and public relations (PR), an introduction to specific online media, and a detailed action plan for implementation.

Scott opens with a personal anecdote about discovering Grain Surfboards through a Google search. Within 30 minutes of landing on the company's content-rich website, he had enrolled in a board-building class costing over $1,000. This experience illustrates the central thesis: organizations that educate and inform through web content convert browsers into buyers far more effectively than those relying on traditional advertising. He traces his own journey from vice president of marketing at NewsEdge Corporation, where he discovered that homegrown, content-based web programs consistently outperformed expensive traditional programs run by outside agencies. Since founding his own business in 2002, Scott has watched new forms of online media emerge, from blogs and social networks to podcasts and video, all enabling direct communication with the marketplace.

In the book's first section, Scott contrasts old and new approaches. He describes visiting major automaker websites and finding them filled with TV-style advertising and generic messaging rather than the educational content buyers seek. Traditional advertising, he argues, relies on interruption and one-way messaging, an approach ineffective for organizations that are not megabrands. Similarly, the old PR model, in which press releases were written exclusively for journalists and success was measured by clip books of media mentions, is obsolete. Scott places this shift in historical context, comparing the web's emergence (which he dates to 1995 with Netscape's initial public offering) to Gutenberg's invention of the printing press, calling it the most important communications revolution in human history.

Scott then articulates what he calls the new rules. Marketing is no longer about advertising to the masses but about delivering content when buyers need it. PR is no longer exclusively about mainstream media but about buyers finding the organization on the web. People want authenticity, not spin, and the lines between marketing and PR have blurred online. To illustrate, Scott profiles Gerard Vroomen, co-founder of racing bicycle company Cervélo Cycles and Open Cycle, who built successful global businesses by blogging, answering customer questions on his website, and engaging on social networks without traditional marketing staff. He also profiles the KOREAZ social media channels run by South Korea's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which use entertaining bilingual content as a form of digital public diplomacy.

The book's second section introduces specific online media across multiple chapters. Scott defines social media broadly, encompassing platforms like Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and LinkedIn, as well as blogs, video sharing, podcasting, and social audio. He proposes thinking of social media as cocktail parties: participants should listen more than they speak and avoid shouting product pitches. Case studies range widely, from Canada Tourism's "Upgrade to Canada" campaign, which increased Canada's competitive destination share by 21.5 percent, to Kolkata Chai Co., whose co-founders Ani and Ayan Sanyal used Instagram to grow their chai business from a farmer's market stall to projected $10 million revenue without paid influencer marketing.

Scott argues that a content-rich website is the central hub unifying all online efforts and that blogs remain essential because, unlike content posted on social networks, blog posts are owned by the creator and indexed by search engines for years. On real-time marketing, he contends that speed and agility deliver decisive competitive advantage, profiling Eloqua CEO Joe Payne, who wrote a blog post within hours of Oracle's acquisition of a competitor, became the primary source in resulting media coverage, and generated nearly $1 million in new business within two weeks.

The chapter on artificial intelligence represents the ninth edition's most significant update. Scott describes his use of tools like Otter for transcription, ChatGPT for summarizing and brainstorming, and DALL-E for creating illustrations. He defines generative AI as tools that create new writing, images, and multimedia, and profiles experts who advise marketers on practical applications. He warns that AI poses risks including amplification of bias and homogenized content, and addresses the legal conflict between AI companies and content creators, noting that three of his own books were used without permission in the Books3 training database. He compares the situation to the early conflict between Napster and the music labels.

The third section provides an action plan. Scott instructs readers to align marketing objectives with organizational goals, then build detailed buyer personas, which are representative profiles of distinct buyer groups. He illustrates the process with examples including a college website serving five different personas and the Shareholder Whistleblower Hotline, where research identified different terminology used by U.S. and Canadian buyers, leading to separate web content that achieved the top Google ranking. He emphasizes using the actual words and phrases buyers use rather than corporate jargon, devoting an entire chapter to exposing overused terms like "innovate" and "leading provider" that render press releases meaningless.

Scott extends his framework to the sales process, arguing that buyers now gather information independently online and engage sales representatives only at the last moment. He outlines a three-step buying process: informational content demonstrating expertise, a "friendly nudge" introducing products, and easy-to-use purchasing mechanisms. He argues that CEOs should serve as their organizations' chief spokesperson online and that salespeople should rewrite their LinkedIn profiles to focus on how they help buyers rather than listing sales achievements.

Subsequent chapters cover specific tactics including news releases reimagined as direct-to-buyer tools optimized for search engines, online newsrooms designed for multiple stakeholders, targeted media relations, and newsjacking, which Scott defines as injecting ideas into breaking news stories to generate coverage. He also addresses search engine marketing, contending that organizations should own their marketing assets through content generating traffic for years rather than renting visibility through advertising. Additional chapters provide detailed guidance on visual content, video marketing (profiling builder Matt Risinger's YouTube channel with over one million subscribers), and podcasting (profiling Mignon Fogarty's Grammar Girl podcast with tens of millions of downloads).

Scott closes with practical guidance for implementation, reassuring readers that the new rules can be adopted incrementally. He profiles the Cleveland Metropolitan School District, where chief communications officer Roseann Canfora built a news operation staffed by former journalists to tell the district's stories directly, and National Community Church in Washington, DC, led by pastor Mark Batterson, which reaches thousands weekly through podcasts, blogs, and video without a traditional church building. Scott identifies four ways to generate attention: buying it through advertising, earning it through media gatekeepers, generating it through salespeople, or earning it online through valuable free content. He argues that most organizations overinvest in the first three and underinvest in the fourth.