In the current day, it takes no effort for an organization to go under the clutter and disappear. With the price of advertising rising, many are turning towards public relations in the hopes of making it to the top. The effectiveness of this discipline is questionable. This essay hopes to establish that public relations is an effective substitute to advertising. The cost of advertising is increasing along with the number of advertisements present all around us, every day. The number of advertisements an average person sees everyday varies but experts say it is up in the hundreds. The situation is getting complicated and competitive and to stand out among all these adverts, one must have a really good commercial/ad themselves. This could cost more money than a company can afford. They may end up yielding no profit. Public Relations is a relatively new subject to be studied despite the fact that it may have been around in the past, too. Defining it is difficult but the basis of public relations is, "the management of communication between an organization and its publics" - Todd Hunt, Jame E. Grunig (1997). The company makes an effort to understand the public rather than simply feed the public what the management things they need to be fed. It can be considered as free publicity and that's where the easiest difference to spot between advertising and PR is. According to William Wells, advertising can be defined as follows. "Advertising is paid non-personal communication from an identified sponsor using mass media to persuade or influence an audience." Advertising is paid publicity, whereas PR is free publicity. But, there have been instances where people have paid/bribed journalists for a story in an attempt to build goodwill or sell their product/service. PR works to build relationships, communicate with and understand the consumers. Effective PR is important to the well-being of the company overall as not only does PR establish goodwill with the organization's publics, it also does crisis management, which is one of its most important functions. Inefficient handling of a crisis situation could be as disastrous as the crisis itself. For an example, a fire at a hospital. If they fail to handle the situation properly, many more lives could be lost than the number if they had handled it properly. A well-structured PR campaign will provide the customer with much more information than an advert and thus, more space and time for the product/service/company. It is very low in cost compared to advertising but could be equally or even more powerful than advertising. The reason for this is because generations of media spoon-feeding has made people believe most of what media provides and when they read a journalist writing well about a company, they truly believe it. For an example, if a new organic restaurant puts up a few adverts claiming it is the best organic restaurant in town, less people will believe it than when a journalist who critiques restaurants in the local newspaper writes the same thing. This hits harder than adverts because credibility is a strong persuasion. PR is a direct interaction between a company and its publics, so establishing credibility through PR is easier.