Thanks to the Internet and other technological advances, public relations has undergone more changes in the past decade than Joan Rivers’ face. But there’s one medium that’s still as effective as ever, even if it has fallen off the radar of most PR pros (except those at Pavone, of course).

I’m talking about TV — or more specifically, product placement on television programming. In most cases, I’m referring to shows in which the product is part of the story or the focus of the show and not just a prop in the background of a sitcom (though we have had some good success with that tactic, too).

Take a couple of recent successes cooked up by the Pavone PR team. True to PR’s “earned media” foundation, all of these placements cost absolutely nothing, aside from the time it took us to pitch the idea and coordinate or assist with the opportunity.

We’ve worked with the Food Network to score placements for Turkey Hill Dairy. A year or so ago, the show “Unwrapped” visited Turkey Hill’s Lancaster County headquarters to tape a segment for a show about peanut butter treats where they featured Light Recipe Moose Tracks. Today, we’re helping out once again, as the Unwrapped crew wraps up an episode featuring Turkey Hill’s Double Decker Ice Cream Sandwiches.

We’ve even worked with the folks at the Rachael Ray Show to score placement of Utz Quality Foods’ Grandma Utz’s Handcooked Potato Chips as the show’s “Snack of the Day.” A clip of that media relations coup can be seen on the Pavone Food website. More recently, when the History Channel’s “Modern Marvels” wanted to feature a home being built for a March episode about start-to-finish manufacturing processes, Pavone helped to coordinate the taping of a modular home being built by our client, Excel Homes, and its builder partner, Atlantic Modular Builders.

These examples of coverage aren’t without their ROI, either. The six-minute History Channel segment resulted in a 361 percent increase in traffic to the Excel Homes website in the two days following the episode. Leads generated by the website also increased more than 400 percent. Those numbers should be enough to sway anyone who doubts the power of PR.

So has the Internet and technology changed the way we practice public relations? Of course it has. But there’s still plenty of PR gold to be mined in the world of television. You just have to know where to look for it.

I’d like to start this entry by introducing you to one of my best friends. Pap (otherwise known as my grandfather) is 73 years old. He’s just a small town boy, born and raised in Lykens, PA. He’s an ex-mailman who’s been retired for two years.

We speak via cell phone every day before I leave for work and more often on weekends. Like many posts prior, we know many in Pap’s generation are not digital, they are not tech-savvy and they are certainly not avid smartphone, Twitter or Facebook users, or even computer literate. But there is one advertising medium that Pap enjoys… in his pajamas, feet on the recliner, with a cup of coffee. Yep, you guessed it – the one advertising medium that is on its deathbed.

Pap religiously reads The Patriot-News, where he has obtained information, news, sports statistics, politics, and even weather updates for the past 50+ years. We discussed the decline of print newspapers the other evening over dinner.

“Holy smokes,” he said. “You know that Patriot-News? It’s getting thinner and thinner by the day.”

We all know 2009 was a bumpy road, especially for newspapers:

• 105 newspapers have been shuttered
• 10,000 newspaper jobs have been lost
• Print ad sales fell 30% in Q1 ‘09
• 23 of the top 25 newspapers reported circulation declines between 7% and 20%

These facts prove people would just rather have news at their fingertips, on their smartphone or laptop.

We know the newspaper is close to extinction, but could you really imagine a world without newspapers? No classifieds, no Local & State, no Food section, no ads from local restaurants, no sticker updates from Planet Fitness that their membership is only $1 (not 75 cents), no high school sports, no comics, no letters to the editor, no coupons…

Local newspapers are the complete package. You don’t have to read the whole paper, but it’s all there – from news you may not want to know (but should) to feature stories that touch your heart. You can cut out your wedding announcement, an honor roll list that your baby brother made or a sports story that includes an NFL football player like Jahri Evans, who made it to the Super Bowl and hails from my alma mater, Bloomsburg University. When my great-grandmother, Pap’s mother, passed away, at the age of 103, we cut her obituary out of the newspaper and laminated a copy of it for him.

No future version of Google or Bing is going to give him that!

Interactive TV was a technology that has been promised to us for so long. I remember studying it in college in the 90s. My textbooks talked about it as if it was right around the corner. You know, you are watching a TV show and the drink the actor has looks interesting. Interactive TV would enable you to click on it, find out more information and order it – all without leaving your couch! I have yet to see this.

But it started before I was in college. During the 1970s, QUBE was an interactive cable service offered to subscribers in Columbus, Ohio. QUBE customers were given set-top decoder boxes with five buttons and could participate in game shows, call plays in a college football game and take part in electronic town meetings.

Here we are in 2009 and we’re not doing things like seeing real-time sports statistics, selecting alternate viewpoints, or playing an interactive game on our TVs. The only major improvements in the past 15 years have been the mainstream availability of HDTV sets and programming, on-demand movie watching, and DVRs. So what happened?

In the nineties, various companies tried numerous approaches to introducing iTV services. Solutions tended to require new, advanced (and expensive) set-top boxes and huge infrastructure investments. Many companies did trial runs in local markets. They all failed. TVs were standard definition, Internet was dial up and there was little processing power available. In 1995 Apple announced their own set-top box (iTV) for a six-state trial of interactive television services.

Why hasn’t iTV attempted a resurgence? Maybe there is just too much new technology now. People are just now upgrading to HDTV, DVRs and BlueRay. Or maybe it’s because interacting with TV is already here–just in a different form. Tens of millions of people are texting in votes to American Idol and other shows. Fantasy sports websites spike to accommodate people checking their team stats while watching the games on TV. Shows like Heroes have real-time interactive chat sessions online during new episodes. And political and sporting events cause massive usage of services like Twitter. So maybe interactive TV is here. It’s just happening on our cell phones and laptops instead of through the traditional TV.

What do you think?

Advertising behavioral targeting pioneer NebuAd has shut down after pressure from Congress and privacy lawsuits, Time Warner dumped AOL for failing to turn it into an ad supported business and Facebook finally makes a profit only to run into privacy issues of its own. The media landscape is changing and yes we have to analyze it and make sure we’re in the right place, but the heart of what we do is not going away – connecting people to brands and motivating them into action.

This makes me think of a case study I saw presented at an Adweek Creative conference a couple years ago. BMW wanted to target 46-year-olds, with a median income of $150,000. They knew two-thirds were male, married, and had no children. But they also discovered that 85 percent of BMW purchasers used the Internet before purchasing.

BMW Films was born by combining the ideas of producing a series of short films and using the Internet. They assembled a cast of A-list directors and actors, and developed scripts based on having a central character helped through difficult circumstances using driving skills—in a BMW. The car became the star. Each director was given complete creative control.

The effort was supported with movie trailer style TV spots, print and online advertising. The campaign was solely designed to drive consumers to the BMW Films website. After a required registration, viewers could stream the films or download a BMW Film Player that included vivid descriptions of the vehicles.

In the first year more than 10 million films were viewed from BMWFilms.com. Nearly 2 million people registered on the site, with 60 percent of those registrants opting to receive more information via e-mail. An amazing 94 percent of registrants recommended films to others, seeding the viral campaign, and more than 40,000 people responded to a survey. They even spun off a contest by having visitors enter to win the M5 used in “The Star.”

The really interesting part of this story is that BMW Films was first conceived in 2000. Sometimes to understand the future you have to look at the past. What can we learn from this almost 10-year-old campaign?

• Know your target through research
• Give creative freedom because ideas are king
• Success comes from media integration

It reminds me of my German car. People are talking about the latest hybrid and electric cars while my 1999 Jetta averages 47 mpg on diesel technology that’s been around for decades.

It was too late to stop the presses on the current issue of Golf Digest which was printed and in the mail just days before the Tiger Woods saga began. Here we see the world’s best golf “playa” in the role of President Obama’s caddy aside the headline “10 tips Obama can take from Tiger.” Tip #1: Don’t agree to be Photoshopped onto the cover of a national magazine with an athlete, no matter how squeaky clean they may appear to be at the time.