Although they can kind of be viewed as the same, Public Relations and Advertising are not! I think this confuses many people because they both use the same tactics to each their objective however do not have the same objective. In a sense, yes in both fields, the goal is to sell something. With PR this could be a public figure, a major company, or an idea. With Advertisement this could be a bottle of coke, or toothpaste.
The main differences between the two include: Space, control, and the life-span. With space in advertising a company will pay for an Ad, they will pay for print space in a news paper or pay for air time in a commercial. While with PR, the space is free. Usually companies will release press releases, which is basically free publicity. Moving on to control, with ads a company will have creative control because they are paying for a space. With PR, a company has no control on how the media will present their information to the public. And lastly life-span, this one is probably one of the biggest differences amongst the two. Because in advertisement, you pay for the space, you can run this ad over and over again for as long as your budget allows. This gives advertisement a sense of a larger shelf life. On the other hand, in public relations usually company's send a press release about something once, therefore there is basically only one time for exposure.
Here is a link to the top 10 most Viral Ads today: http://www.adweek.com/news-gallery/advertising-branding/10-most-viral-ads-2013-so-far-149832#google-how-it-feels-through-glass-10
Here are the top 10 differences between PR and Advertisement, my source: http://advertising.about.com/od/careersource/a/10advpr.htm
Yours,
Sarah Day
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