Phillycars.com

Philadelphia Media Holdings, owner of the Philidalephia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News and philly.com, has launched an new campaign for its car site phillycars.com, which focuses on its localness. So the goal of the campaign is to establish Phillycars.com "as the local car-buying site with thousands of cars, a broad array of choices throughout the Delaware Valley," says Ed Mahlman, chief marketing officer at Philadelphia Media Holdings.

The campaign, with a budget estimated at more than US$1 million (EUR 770K), is wide-ranging, including television and radio commercials, the Internet, outdoor ads and of course, space in The Inquirer and The Daily News. The entire campaign was created by Quaker City Mercantile, a Philadelphia agency known for its offbeat, energetic campaigns for advertisers like Chupa Chups, William Grant & Sons, MTV and R.J. Reynolds.

Philadelphia Media Holdings is run by local boy, Brian P. Tierney, who bought the Philadelphia properties that were formerly part of the Knight Ridder newspaper chain from their new owner, the McClatchy Company.
The Philadelphia newspapers worked with Cars.com when they were owned by Knight Ridder. Mr. Tierney, who is chief executive at Philadelphia Media Holdings, says he ended the arrangement because "we wanted to create our own proprietary brand" in conjunction with the local car dealers.
The creation of Phillycars.com came not long after Mr. Tierney withdrew from CareerBuilder, the job-search Web site owned by Gannett, McClatchy and Tribune, and formed an alliance with Monster Worldwide, the operator of the rival Monster.com service. The new allies started a co-branded Web site (philly.com/monster) in the first such agreement between Monster.com and the owner of big-city newspapers.