Today the US Patent Office Granted the New York-based firm D Simon Productions official trademark approval for the term “PRketing™.”

Company CEO and President Doug Simon describes PRketing ™ as “a new approach to brand building that relies upon content creation and distribution to achieve business and marketing goals.”

In order to fall under Simon’s newly trademarked banner, content must be good enough to inspire journalists (or, let’s be honest, bloggers) to share it across various media platforms while simultaneously heightening the public’s awareness of a given client and serving its larger PR goals. Sounds like a new way to describe brand journalism, doesn’t it?

We’ve written a good bit about the “boundary-free” appeal of firms beefing up their content-creation capabilities in order to offer both marketing and PR services in the same tidy package–and we can say with confidence that it’s hardly a new idea.

Here’s the given D Simon Productions example of PRketing ™ in action:

It’s a “viral video” that’s really an ad promoting lactose-free milk, starring New England Patriots wide receiver Deion Branch and produced in collaboration with the National Dairy Council, Jordan Dairy Farms and, we assume, the NFL:

What do we think, PR pros? How, exactly, does this trademarked product “make the PR function the driver of the integrated marketing/communications team and increase the power of PR to the C-Suite”?

Is PRketing ™ a totally new approach or a slight spin on a classic business model? Is this announcement just further evidence that the always-blurry line between PR and marketing will continue to become less and less relevant with time?

And will initiatives like this one further challenge media consumers to distinguish between paid content and editorial content?

Here’s Simon explaining his philosophy in greater detail: