knope2001

I've noticed that AirTran advertising has largely disappeared here in Milwaukee just in the past few weeks. In recent years, AirTran has had a steady, ongoing diet of outdoor advertising and television commercials here. Especially notable has been a heavy rotation of AirTran ads on high-profile electronic billboards, and those seem to be gone. I think at least some of the static billboards are still up (though at least one is gone) but perhaps if those are also ending it takes longer for those to expire and be replaces. And I have not noticed an AirTran commercial on local TV in a few weeks as well, although that's hard to know for sure.

Anyone else see this where they are? I'm not sure if AirTran's advertising was as frequent and dense elsewhere as it was here, so perhaps a change might not be so noticable.

There does not seem to be any increase in Southwest advertising here at this point. Southwest is in negotiations with the Brewers to potentially take over the AirTran Landing Zone sponsorship at Miller Park, which i think Newsmanhoss already reported thought I can't find it this morning. (The Brewers will only confirm that it won't be AirTran Landing next year but won't confirm the entity or entities looking to replace AirTran Landing -- it had been sponsorded by Mercedees Benz prior to 2009) When Southwest started MKE-DEN and took over MKE-STL from AirTran/Skywest in September, Southwest did a great deal of radio advertising about the new flights, but since then their ad spending seems to have been thin here too. However that might be "normal".

(a) Is this part of a broad wind-down of AirTran advertising? If so, perhaps they are going to start joint advertising and possibly co-branding sooner rather than later.

(b) Is this a Milwaukee-only cut, signaling something about Milwaukee? It could be that MKE is less competitive and not worth focused advertising. That makes some sense in that Frontier is less of a competitor than it was. But on the other hand in the past several months AirTran's electronic advertising has been mostly in markets not served nonstop by Frontier (MKE-LAX, MKE-SFO, MKE-FLL in summer, etc), so it does not seem to have been Frontier-focused. Another possibility if it is MKE-only is that the amount of money AirTran has been sending to MKE advertising may far outweigh the importance of MKE in the combined Southwest system. I spend a lot of time in KC, which is a busier market than WN+FL in MIlwaukee, and there's far less WN money spent there than FL money here.

Has anyone else noticed pullbacks to AirTran's advertisting?