something about advertising versus PR

an interesting study has been conducted by sara rosengren, doctoral student at handelshögskolan (university of business, stockholm). her study of how noise, or cluster utterly affects the marketing communication process indicates that advertisements are more memorable (hence effective?) than branded articles (PR) - questioning previous results that have indicated the contrary (with no particular example to backup these studies).
the study was basically carried out in clustered environments where the contributers received various messages - advertisement and branded articles - to interpret and later respond to. The result indicated a significant distinction, unveiling that 55 percent could recall the brands from the advertisements, but only 33 percent were able to recall similar information from the articles; still the articles were more trustworthy, yet in the end there were no significant differences of what the respondents actually thought about the brand.

interesting stuff, but does it provide an holistic perspective? moreover, still not to underestimate PR's influence on consumers, even though it might be difficult to measure. furthermore, i do believe that an insightful and honest marketing approach could crown PR king in an increasingly fragmented business and consumer market, yet with little experience to acknowledge that statement. also i do support that original, or controversial if you like, advertising and PR are interrelated, moreover, beneficially collaborated to create an unmetric effect, unwittingly boosting a campaign's impact. but again, what do i know?