Are we 'in PR?'

At Cannes this year, most of the award winning work across categories had a strong element of PR in it. The winner overall being the Obama Campaign which won the much coveted Titanium.

My feeling is that this is because successful brands today, rather than requiring ‘a big’ and constructed idea, need a series of 'PR'able' ideas that create a momentum or a movement.

Think about the work we did for Pur Asia; creating media hype around our advertising idea of Gastrosexuality, and more recently the work we did for RNLI, where we could have created a 'community service' ad, but instead, and to better effect, we created a social movement that used media to not only broadcast to the youth audience, but to actually create the content.

Isn't this what PR is, using the media to create meaning around a brand (without paying for it)?

And should that be the challenge to ourselves - to start each brief thinking about how we can harness different media channels to amplify the idea?