The role of PR in marketing and advertising

I came across an interesting article about the role of public relations and advertising. Message Control plays a key part in how, when, and where an advertisement is run in all forms of marketing. There is also a flip side to message control and that once the message has been ran, whats next in uncontrollable, ultimately the media will decide the fate of the information and if its newsworthy. Today, TV advertisements have a shorter shelf life than say a press release archived on the internet. But that might not but true much longer as more and more websites are containing commercial content and in terms of shaping public opinion it is huge due to the influence of the web on today's culture. I truly believe that commercial content on the web will be the new medium in which advertisement will be broadcast in the next five to ten years. Archived press released content will always be available on the web but as commercials begin to dominate the web, a press lease may soon become a thing of the past. Another powerful tool in shaping public opinion is through implied endorsement. As creative an advertisement may be someone still paid some amount of money to have a message directly filtered to a consumer. Public Relations can also play a big role for say, smaller companies who can't shell out the big dollars of most corporations. But even some corporations still take advantage of PR third party advertising as this will save a company money because they are not paying to have an advertisement placed but rather a publication is freely giving space to a story about the company. Many corporations will spend exuberant amounts of money on advertising and most have the money to do that. If those companies combine both methods of advertising I believe their influence on shaping public opinion will be even greater. I was able to get a really good understanding of how these advertisements come to be, understanding this helps to understand how a company markets to consumers and their intentions. In today's culture advertising has an ever greater effect because of the internet. If someone wants to create a website but might not have enough funds to do so, simply allow other companies to advertise through banners on your site. That alone could pay for the site to run itself.