After Travel & Leisure Magazine crowned Philadelphia "America's Ugliest City," we decided to take that and use it to our Philly's advantage by drawing tourists with the city's ugliness. We crated a series of print ads with titles like: "Philly's Even More Ugly When You Sleep Over" and "Come Visit Uglytown USA!"

Check out this Fox News segment,as Gerald Kolpan interviews CEO Steve Grasse at the Quaker City Mercantile (formerly known as Gyro Worldwide) offices about Quaker City Mercantile's plans for a new Ugly Philadelphia campaign.

An online poll for Travel & Leisure Magazine pronounced Philly America's Ugliest City. Instead of getting our feathers ruffled over this, we think we should take lemons and make lemonade by taking this title and turning it into a money making tourism campaign for the city. The city's paranoid tourism corporation, GPTMC immediately scoffed at it. What are they so afraid of? Check out Michael Klein's take on the campaign in his article below for The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Oh, it's getting uglier.

Some Souls Can Be Bought and Sold

We stalwart vanguards of moral decency and social propriety here at Metro almost threw up in our mouths when we read this post on Philebrity about Philadelphia advertising guru Steve Grasse's most recent wacked-out attempt to get business.

As most people saw tramped through the news last week, a little-read publication known as Travel + Leisure rated Philadelphia as the bottom of big cities in terms of "attractiveness." (We at Metro also disagree with this, but not to digress.)

We admire an agency that'll create a campaign, publish the fact they've done so, highlight the fact its city has the ugliest people and do it all without any client approval or charging a penny. Yup, Philadelphia's Quaker City Mercantile (formerly known as Gyro Worldwide) has embraced the fact its city was just named the ugliest city in America by Travel & Leisure Magazine readers.

Before Philadelphia was crowned the ugliest, John Waters, during an episode of John Favreau's Dinner For Five, tried to get the mayor of the former ugliest city, Baltimore to embrace its hideousness and create a tourism campaign out of the fact. He reasoned the rest of the country would flock to Baltimore like paparazzi to Britney Spears' cooch.

Philadelphia-based Quaker City Mercantile (formerly known as Gyro Worldwide) ("Breakin' the Rules since 1988") has devised a new tourism campaign for its hometown premised on the much buzzed about designation of Philly as the "Ugliest City in America," based on a Travel & Leisure online poll. The agency has created a series of ads that feature "simple, documentary-style photography that tells it like is," capturing startling unattractive people and taglines such as "Come Visit Uglytown U.S.A!" [cut to shot of director John Waters rolling his eyes and chortling at this way off-tone attempt to mimic his campily clever love/hate approach to Baltimore]

Quaker City Mercantile:Oh Philebrity, don't be sore because Michael Klein saw what an awesome idea this was, when you did not.

Quaker City Mercantile (formerly known as Gyro Worldwide) Announces Ad campaign: Philly is More Ugly When You Sleep Over!

"PHILEBRITY: YAWN

Quaker City Mercantile: I thought you would say something like that. haha

PHILEBRITY: Seriously, I have to run this shit now? How many of you people work over there? And it's THIS? This is the press gag you come up with? Please try harder.