BALTIMORE (Map, News) - Client: Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association

Job: To help raise the visibility of Baltimore as a tourist destination and to attract visitors to the city.

Agency: Web Ad.vantage, based in Havre de Grace, Md.

The Concept: From Virginia Beach northward to New England, the East Coast is saturated with tourist destinations. To compete, the Greater Baltimore area needed a marketing campaign that would remind people about its attractions and position the city as a great drivable destination for visitors from D.C. and Philadelphia, and an affordable vacation option for national travelers.

Plan: Web Ad.vantage created a Web marketing campaign for the organization’s Baltimore.org Web site and its social networking site, visitmybaltimore.com, on which locals can post videos of their favorite Baltimore experiences. The company focused on optimizing search engine results so that the sites would show up when someone searched for things such as “mid-Atlantic tourism destinations,” placed pay-per-click ads alongside search results and reached out to area bloggers to recruit them to mention the sites on their blogs.

Web Ad.vantage is also doing the Web media buying for the organization, placing banner ads or text links on geo-targeted newspaper sites, including The Washington Post, and national travel newsletters, highlighting specific upcoming events and attractions.

Creative team: Web Ad.vantage, Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association, and the organization’s ad agency, Carton Donofrio Partners, based in Baltimore.

Background: Web Ad.vantage is a nine-year-old company that specializes in search engine marketing, online media planning and buying, social media outreach, and Internet strategy and consulting. The Small Business Association named CEO Hollis Thomases the 2007 Maryland Small Business Person of the Year.

Working on Next: The company is running the Web marketing for the holiday campaign of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, which urges people who are scrambling for holiday gift ideas to consider sponsoring a threatened animal in someone’s name.

tluntz@dcexaminer.com