All too often the public treat PR as a gimmick, publicity stunt or the magical disaster limitation. The Internet has certainly not improved this perception, and has probably made matters worse, as fledgling Internet based companies desperately seek the scarcest resource on the Internet - human attention. Amazon books has established a powerful brand image and identity with very little advertising, and Yahoo, Netscape, Altavista and a few others have done likewise. These companies, by being first, have had the advantage of the Internet's world wide word of mouth, but the majority of companies appearing on the Internet do not have that luxury. For the majority of companies, the Internet has changed very little.
Companies treat PR predominantly as publicity or at best building a public identity.
Publicity at the end of the day is just an enabler to sales. Obtaining publicity has usually meant obtaining product reviews in magazines, often benchmarked against other products. For PR agencies, obtaining early visibility of these advanced features is crucial for publicity of a client's products. Benchmarking is of course carried out by journalists, and often they may select products which they want to compare. They therefore have the problem of obtaining a review sample.