Forecasting guru Jack Myers believes PR will buck the "advertising depression" that he sees savaging the business through 2010. Myers has predicted a never-seen-before three straight years of decline in advertising and marketing communications, beginning last year.

For more than two decades, Jack Myers has been among the media industry's leading forecasters. He has consulted on business transformation, revenue-development and relationship best practices with more than 250 media companies, marketers and agencies.

While projecting that ad spending will have declined 2.4 percent in 2008, he believes PR spending will have risen three percent to $4.4B over the same period. According to Myers, the decline in advertising is not just because of a sour economy. "It's secular and systemic. It's like moving from an agrarian to an industrial economy."

Advertising is in the midst of an epic change because the 30-second commercial "is no longer the be-all and end-all," said Myers. Communication is now a "consumer-controlled and interactive process," which makes mastery of the PR channel vital for marketers.

While user-generated content and social programming/networks will continue to be fast growing segments of media, according to Myers, we simply need to acknowledge they might exist for reasons other than creating wealth for their executives and investors.

He concluded that marketers should quickly and definitively integrate their marketing and sales organizations to adapt to new communications realities, and hire those agencies and advisors who offer the most coherent, intelligent and visionary perspective for doing business in the world of 2012.

Companies tracking the evolution of media and plugging into new communication channels will see increasing returns on their marketing investments. Those that continue to play by the old rules of command and control will see diminishing returns - and diminishing marketing budgets.