If you're quaking in your boots because you read somewhere that $1 billion-worth of annual US domestic commercial production has "fled" the country, check the stats first.

At least one media outlet recently implied that production spending at home had experienced a sudden dramatic decline. Not true. So why did they say it? Well, the "$1 billion lost!" reportage is based on a new AICP study which tells us: (a) the US commercial production industry is worth $3.5 billion annually (more if you include talent and post); and (b) one in four shoots takes place outside the US. All of which equals...$1 billion down the toilet.

The math is right but the timeline is off. This isn't a new figure, albeit newly confirmed. More pertinent, perhaps, is the finding that US commercial prodcos actually increased their proportion of domestic shoot days in the past year, from 76% to 78%.

Granted, it's a negligible hike and I'm not suggesting that sending nearly one-quarter of ad production offshore is ideal, but at least there's the tiniest sign of a rebound.

One slight shocker is that Canada, despite poor PR and regular tales of woe from the locals, still garnered the lion's share of foreign revenues between July 2002 and July 2003 and, what's more, upped its percentage. Production centers in Vancouver and Toronto took almost half of all non-US shoot days in '03, compared with 40% in '02.

The only other increase was reported in South Africa, which rose from 4% to 6%. Shoot days in Latin America, Australia and UK all slipped slightly, with the most substantial year-over-year drop coming from central and eastern Europe.

What does this all mean? "There's a lot more to the study than runaway production," the AICP told me, slightly peevishly. (Er, maybe so, but it's the part everyone's talking about.) The two-year study, conducted for the AICP by LA's Goodwin Simon, is meant to provide a benchmark for

performance measurements of the US commercial production biz, and convey the fact that this industry is a "major economic contributor" in the US and around the world.

Rest assured that domestic production is not as dead as a dodo. Even if it was, you'd probably be okay, because extinction ain't what it used to be. Why, just the other week, a supposedly extinct species of bird, the long-legged warbler, surfaced in Fiji after a 110-year absence - to the astonishment of ornothologists who found two dozen of 'em alive and pecking.

In an interview with Boards, a spokeswarbler said the group went into hiding after being falsely accused of making off with $1 billion in commercial production funds.

Alison Eastwood

Editor