"I'd like to know where they get their numbers," asks Jerry Schwartz, founder of G.S. Schwartz & Co. (and an advisory board member to PR NEWS) in response to the study,
which was released late last month by the USC Annenberg Strategic Public Relations Center. It said that PR budgets among companies on Fortune's "Most Admired" were down 5.5% in
2003 while PR staffing in 2003 dropped by an average of 15 staffers within Fortune 500 companies. (On average, however, Fortune 500 companies on the "Most Admired" list employed
more PR people than Fortune 500 companies not on the list - 66 versus 40.)
Schwartz says he's skeptical about the numbers. "The first quarter of '04 has been just excellent," he says, referring to his agency. "Not as good as the late 1990s [in sheer
dollars], of course, but the best it's been in three years and unquestionably the best pace since 2000." He adds that budgets are up considerably among existing clients as well
as new business. "A lot of things get called PR that aren't PR, such as a promotional event that qualifies as PR but the budget is coming out of promotions." Ken Makovsky,
president of Makovsky & Co., a mid-size PR firm based in New York, said his revenues were down slightly in 2003 compared with '02, but that the first quarter of '04 is up
about 20%. Nevertheless, "it doesn't matter whether agencies' numbers are up or down but what the findings of the survey reveal," he says. "It would be a sad day if the Annenberg
School, which is one of the best communication schools in the world, put out numbers that had credibility issues."