Little tidbit from a report:

According to Veronis Suhler Stevenson’s 2006 Communications Industry Report, consumer promotion spending in the U.S. rose only 4.0% to $44.47 billion last year. While that is a sizeable chunk of marketing budgets, it nonetheless is dwarfed in comparison to a much bigger and faster growing consumer advertising business. According to VSS, advertising grew 6.4% last year to $210.29 billion.

What does that tell us? It tells us that while we’re growing as an industry, we’re not growing fast enough. Advertising has always been the big fish in our pond, and it still is. It’s also growing faster than we are, which continues to make it bigger.

Now this isn’t a truly accurate comparison, as we all know that it doesn’t cost $2,000,000 to place a story, but it does to take out a Super Bowl ad. But still – we should make sure we continue to drill our clients as to why PR and Event based promotion is a viable tool, and one that can’t just be lumped in with "the extra dollars left over after the ad buy."

Thus endeth my rant for the day. Go in peace.