A reader left a comment on our website Friday criticizing the “horrible reporting in this town.” The subject? The city tourism organization’s “Find Your Happy Place in Baltimore” advertising campaign, which Daily Record business reporter Melody Simmons writes about in today’s paper.

The campaign launched Thursday at the Inner Harbor with the aid of 261 people who helped form the world’s largest smiley face. That’s according to the Guinness Book of World Records; you can look it up.

Anyway, our helpful reader included a link to an e-mail sent out by Visit Baltimore to its roughly 700 members and partners who subscribe to its e-newsletter. It gets right to the point, in a not-so-happy way.

“As we are preparing to kick off what promises to be an exciting tourism season in Baltimore, it is disheartening that we must deal with unnecessary distractions and refute inaccuracies publicly reported and discussed about a new summer advertising campaign,” reads the note, signed by Visit Baltimore CEO Tom Noonan as well as Ed Hale, chairman of the Baltimore Convention and Tourism Board, and other movers and shakers in the city’s hospitality industry

It goes on to “set the record straight” — “Find Your Happy Place in Baltimore” is an ad campaign, not a tagline or slogan; it is not paid for by taxpayers but rather is funded primarily by hotel taxes; and it actually cost no money to create, since that work was done as part of its monthly retainer with ad agency Carton Donofrio. The $500,000 was actually spent on TV, print and radio ads.

“It is a campaign based on extensive research that shows people, more than ever, are looking to do things that make them happy after a long economic downturn,” Noonan and Hale add in the note. “Visit Baltimore is capitalizing on this national mood and trend with a comprehensive program that promotes those places and things in Baltimore that are certain to make visitors happy.”

Nancy Hinds, Visit Baltimore’s vice president of public affairs, told me that it wasn’t directed at anyone or any media outlet in particular but was part of the organization’s effort to be proactive and not let any misinformation gather momentum in the blogosphere. Competing cities, she added, might spend double what Baltimore’s spending on a similar ad campaign, but “if you don’t advertise you won’t have visitors.”

It was sent out Wednesday, so we’re left to assume that among the “unnecessary distractions” was this item referencing murder and mayhem to generate some sardonic alternatives to the new slogan – er, ad campaign.

Can’t we all just get our Preak on?

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There’s been a lot of chatter over Under Armour’s logo that was painted on the north side of Federal Hill (facing the Inner Harbor) a few days ago.

The logo, which was the company’s signature linked “UA” symbol, has since been painted over. (Yeah. Because a big fat black square totally looks better … )

Under Armour said the logo was an advertisement in support of a volleyball tournament held at the Baltimore Convention Center. Under Armour wasn’t a sponsor of the tournament but it has done similar things for the city’s Recreation and Parks department in the past to welcome sporting events, according to the department’s spokeswoman.

Now an article in today’s Baltimore Sun says painting the logo on park property may have been illegal. Although the company coordinated with the parks department, a permit was not obtained from the city.

For a company that has been lauded for its pumped-up ad campaigns in the past, this is a major boo-boo. I don’t think Under Armour has received this much flak for a marketing move since it paid just under $3 million for a Super Bowl ad in 2008. And even then at least the company was getting a lot of bang for its advertising dollar instead of sticking its tail between its legs and covering up a PR miscue.

How bad is this mistake for Under Armour? Are the media and residents making too much of it? And how long, by the way, will it take to grow out that ugly black square of a reminder on Federal Hill?

It is tourist season, you know …

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I will look for just about any reason to insert “snowpocalypse” into a sentence this week.

So for today’s excuse — if you haven’t gotten that Valentine’s Day present yet, now’s probably a good time to hop online and order that trinket for overnight delivery before high winds hand you a power outage. With the area’s malls closed again today because of the blizzard, stores could be a war zone on Friday and Saturday as people rush to escape cabin fever and snatch up some last-minute gifts.

And if you’re thinking you’d like to find something different this year instead of the usual flowers, jewelry or candy, you’re not alone. According to the National Retail Federation, practical gifts are stylish this year, with 14.4 percent of shoppers planning on buying a sweater, winter accessory or another clothing option for their loved one. That’s up from just over 10 percent last Valentine’s Day.

In addition, the NRF says men will spend nearly twice as much as women on the holiday this year ($135 compared with $72), and most shoppers will head for discount stores and department stores. Or in the Mid-Atlantic’s case, that may translate to Target.com or Macys.com.

And even if you’re splurging on shipping to make sure your gift gets here by Saturday, you can still make up for that in savings online. Target’s having a Treasure Hunt Deals sale, visit DealCatcher for hundreds of coupons for flowers or electronics or you can be sneaky at Macys.com and buy something for yourself and receive a Lancome gift set for her (or buy something for him and get the gift set for yourself) AND they’ve thrown in free shipping. Sears is also having an online sale of its MP3 players, cameras and digital picture frames.

So as you watch the snow slowly pile against your windows, be thankful you can still look like a superstar to your significant other while barely lifting a finger. Imagine what a pain snowpocalypse would have been in the days before the Internet!

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Normally I’m a Tivo nut – I record just about every show I watch on TV just so I can skip through the commercials. But the Super Bowl is the one day of the year I look forward to the ads just as much as I do the programming.

Game-wise, this year didn’t disappoint. In what easily could have been a blowout, Super Bowl XLIV was full of drama, lead changes and a record-tying comeback win. An interception returned for a touchdown late in the fourth quarter clinched it for the underdog New Orleans Saints over the Indianapolis Colts.

And while that all adds up to a great game, it also means great television ratings and a good buy for advertisers. And at about $2.7 million per 30 seconds, that’s nothing to sniff at.

OK, good for them. But what about us viewers? For me, I generally was not disappointed in my annual watching-of-commercials-athon. But I wasn’t particularly wowed, either.

As a viewer, I’m going for laughs and memorability. For me, winners in both categories were – surprisingly – many of the auto commercials.

Dodge Charger’s “Man’s last stand” was great because just about anyone could identify with at least one part of that commercial. Volkswagon’s “Punch Dub” commercial drew probably the biggest laugh of the night from us because it seemed like just another commercial until Stevie Wonder showed up at the end (you’ll have to watch it, I’m not giving away the joke).

Hyundai’s “Ten years” commercial poked fun at Brett Favre’s indecision over retirement (and kudos to Farve for playing along – he’s also appeared in Sears commercials doing a similar shtick).

Other commercials that stood out in my memory weren’t necessarily funny, but they did their job. The most prominent one was Tim Tebow’s “Focus on the Family.” One, because an evangelical Christian group just naturally stands out as an advertiser when its grouped among beer and soft drink companies and Internet sites; and two, because of all the hype about the ad’s anti-abortion message.

Other memorable advertisers (mostly for their sheer number of commercials) were Denny’s, GoDaddy.com, Bud Light, Monster.com, FloTV and Dorritos.

To view all the Super Bowl commercials, click here.

So what were your favorite commercials this year? Was the 2010 lineup disappointing? Did it blow you away? Did you miss some of the regular advertisers like Pepsi, FedEx or General Motors?

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I know I’ve already blogged about this so I’ll keep it short and sweet. The January sweeps television ratings came out this week, and once again WJZ (Baltimore’s CBS affiliate) is riding high with the No. 1-rated nightly newscast.

WJZ’s 11 p.m. newscast drew a household rating of 8.8, while WBAL (Baltimore’s NBC affiliate) drew a 6.7. (ABC affiliate WMAR drew 2.2 for its late night newscast and FOX affiliate WBFF drew a 4.4 for its 10 p.m. newscast.)

After this fall’s experiment, Jay Leno will soon be off the air at 10 p.m., but the damage has been done. Compare WBAL’s 6.7 with what it drew last May, when it was the No. 1 nightly newscast: then, the station had a 10.2 rating. WJZ had a 9.7.

Now the real recovery test for NBC affiliates starts when the network broadcasts the Winter Olympics beginning next week. Jordan Wertlieb, WBAL’s president and general manager, told me during an interview last month he believes NBC has the ability for a quick turnaround.

“We’re glad to see they’ve been reactive to local stations,” he said at the time. “Of course we always hope the rating goes back up.”

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I got an e-mail this week that started out with this:

Dear Liz,

According to a new study, 78% of respondents said the American Dream has died.

Wow, that’s depressing.

The statistic is from a recently released report called Coming of Age in the Great Recession, compiled by the consulting firm, Context-Based Research Group, and Baltimore ad agency, Carton Donofrio Partners. The report explores consumer attitudes about the post-recession era.

The study is a follow up to the firms’ “Grounding the American Dream” released in 2008.

The 2009 study found that some believe the American dream has died because “the dream” had become defined in terms of material possessions rather than freedom and ideals. It found that 83 percent of respondents made permanent changes in spending and saving behavior, and the same percentage planned to spend more time with family and friends over the holidays then they had previously.

“Our studies portray a society moving into an era where we measure the quality of our lives in social terms before economic ones,” Cleve Corlett, Context-Based Research Group’s director of quantitative research, said in a statement. “Forty-three percent of Americans believe the recession has positively affected their lives. With this kind of positive reinforcement, we now see the potential to maintain a healthy balance between our consumer and non-consumer sense of selves.”

So maybe these findings aren’t as depressing as the e-mail started out (unless you’re a retailer and dependent on people buying expensive items they don’t need).

Do you agree with these findings? I personally think they might be a little optimistic in terms of people’s permanent willingness to place inner happiness over having outside things. But maybe I’m a cynic. I am a journalist, after all…

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I imagine executives at The Baltimore Sun will be watching this one.

In newspapers’ ongoing battle in the digital era, The New York Times is biting the bullet and will be the first major daily to charge for frequent access to its Web site. The paper is rolling out the plan in early 2011 and plans to allow non-subscribing visitors to the site a certain number of free articles per month. After that, you have to pay for site access for the rest of the month.

We don’t yet know how many articles will come for free and how much the access will cost, but The Times is the first paper in the nation to try this model. I imagine it’ll be watched closely by other major papers around the country as everybody is struggling with how to keep afloat in this business.

Back in the olden days, advertising was easily most newspapers’ top revenue stream while subscriber fees typically paid for ink and paper. But over the last decade subscriptions have fallen as readers have found they can get basically the same content online. And over the last couple years (thank you Recession of 2008), advertisers have practically fled the market.

Solutions over the last year or so have included, layoffs, redesigns, printing on fewer days, going to online only. Remember the Baltimore Examiner? Remember when The Sun was thicker? Those days are gone and as The Times tries to forge ahead, I wonder who will follow.

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Under Armour’s Kevin Plank and Steve Battista can probably share a thing or two with Chrysler execs this week. Ever since the troubled auto maker snatched up a 60-second spot during this year’s Super Bowl, the company has been the butt of criticism from consumers who say Chrysler is wasting its money.

Chrylser plans to showcase its Dodge brand in its first Super Bowl ad since 2004.

At about $3 million/30 seconds, consumers are questioning the manufacturer’s judgment in spending an estimated $6 million for a single ad. Baltimore-based Under Armour also received criticism in 2008 when it chose to debut its first non-cleated athletic shoe in a 60-second Super Bowl advertisement. Analysts downgraded its stock in response and questioned the advertising blitz. It’s stock price also went down by a third in a single month.

At the time, CEO Kevin Plank and Vice President of Brand Steve Battista said the ad was like a coming out party for Under Armour to expose the brand to more people in its target audience. But actions speak louder than words — at the company’s investors day a few months later, one of the first things Plank told the audience was that the company would NOT be buying a Super Bowl ad the following year.

The consensus from the advertising world seems to be that Chrysler’s decision is a good one if the ad serves its purpose — which is to generate enthusiasm for the brand and get people buying Chrysler again. And that’s something that will take months to determine.

In Under Armour’s case, despite the flak the company received for buying the ad in 2008, the move hasn’t hurt the company’s image and in hindsight, one could argue it was the right decision for the time.

As Battista put it a year ago, in 2008, “no one had ever even seen what Under Armour [non-cleated] footwear looked like. The Super Bowl is great for that.”

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I came across a great piece today on the abysmal year its been for advertising firms that have seen their revenues plummet and have instituted mass layoffs. (Not much different from any other major company out there in 2009, come to think of it. But that doesn’t mean it stings any less.)

I highly recommend you read the whole article in the Wall Street Journal. But the gist of it is that ad firms saw unprecedented growth and creativity in the early part of this decade with the dot-com explosion only to finish out the decade with unprecedented cuts and downsizing (if not the total failure) of businesses.

And 2010 doesn’t look like it’s going to be much better, says Maurice Levy, chief executive of Publicis Groupe, one of the world’s largest ad companies.

Ad spending (which fell an estimated 10 percent in the U.S. this year) is expected to remain flat at best in 2010. Some say spending could slip again as far as 2.6 percent in the U.S.

Where did all the car ads go? Ad spending by U.S. automakers fell by 30 percent in 2009 and ad executives don’t expect the companies to return to their pre-recession advertising any time soon.

Lastly, while Washington may be bailing out the Big Three and other major companies, stiffer regulations passed by Congress are limiting the advertising world. In 2010, legislators may consider passing regulations on food advertising aimed at children, among other laws.

So I wonder what the long term effect will be for ad firms? In the earlier part of this decade, we saw larger agencies swallowing up smaller ones — but in 2009 those behemoth firms were the ones that had to make the biggest cuts in their workforce.

The last few years have been characterized by the popularity of boutique firms and specialty shops.  Nowadays it’s rare to find a major company that doesn’t have a contract with at least two advertising firms. Will boutique firms be the way of the 2010s? Or will the cycle start all over again in a few years when (if) the economy picks up?

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It may not look like it (OK, it doesn’t look like it), but Laurel Park has got some character. Or at least the marketing folks are having fun with the place.

On the thoroughbred track’s Facebook page, an album called “The Rody’s are Coming to Laurel Park on August 22″ highlights the new addition to the track’s “Picnic at the Park” day on Saturday. (A rody is that inflatable orange horse you see in the photo to the left. To view the rest of the album, click here.)

Laurel’s family event features rides, games, a petting zoo, face painting, a barn area, an Anne Arundel County Fire Department exhibit, crafts and picnic fare.

I highly encourage you to click through the photo album — at least half of the images had me giggling. And this kind of fun-loving spirit is one that many have been saying would be attractive to bring back to Maryland’s tracks, which for the most part are cacophonous reminders of days gone by.

At the Maryland Horse Forum earlier this month people talked about how to improve horse racing’s exposure. Cute stunts like this are an example of how that can be done.

The only problem is, I haven’t heard or seen ads for Laurel’s Picnic at the Park at all over the last few weeks. In fact, the only reason I know about it is because I read all the way to the bottom of a press release — the last two sentences mentioned the event.

If word isn’t spreading — beyond the close-knit horse racing community — about the nice things tracks are doing, it seems we need to  find a better way to advertise, before more money is spent on fun events that nobody knows about.

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