It time for our annual local Super Bowl ad poll. We’ve listed the top ten ads as picked by the USA Today panel. Their favorite this year was from Doritos:

What was your favorite?

How the Hard Rock Hotel is promoting the Big Game

When a local reporter gets tapped to cover a professional sports championship, its a plum of an assignment that makes up for all those miserable quarters of high school football in the sleet, or the mind-numbing innings of a pitching dual.

What makes covering the championship of the National Football League unique, is that depending on your lawyers’ interpretation of copyright and trademark laws, these reporters may not be able to specifically name the event they are covering. That’s the case of Mike Ruzzi and Jay Puskar, whose station WICU will broadcast the Pro Football Championship Sunday evening. In a spot promoting their coverage from Indianapolis, the talk is all about the Championship and the Big Game.

In a Chicago Tribune article Wednesday, the paper quotes an NFL spokesman regarding protecting their trademarked phrase “Super Bowl”, “When we become aware of a potential violation, we will be very aggressive, and sending a cease and desist letter would be the first step.”

In a 2008 newsletter to its clients, broadcast law firm Leventhal, Senter & Lerman warned that:

Without express permission from the NFL or the teams, you may not use the following, or related protected
words or logos in marketing or promotions:

• “Super Bowl”
• “Super Sunday”
• The Super Bowl logo
• “NFL”, “AFC”, or “NFC”
• “National Football League”
• “American Football Conference”
• “National Football Conference”
• Any team name (e.g., “Patriots”) or nickname (“Pats”)

The law firm goes on to indicate that stations can’t even give away tickets to the game in a promotion, even if they paid for them; it’s one of the terms and conditions on the ticket itself.

I’m quite sure that the verbal gymnastics Mike and Jay might occasionally enter into won’t diminish the coolness of one of the best assignments of their careers…at the big game in Indianapolis.

WJET-AM up in the Fall 2011 ratings

Fall 2011 radio ratings released Tuesday show a diversification of listeners among Erie stations, with all but one of the subscribing Connoisseur Media stations losing shares.

Arbitron, the media measurement company, made only Connoisseur’s 12+ shares public today, as the other local stations do not subscribe to the service.

What we do know is that FM standard bearers WRTS (Star 104), WXBB (Bob FM), and WRKT (Rocket 101) all experienced their lowest shares in four books, with only WJET-AM recovering from a spring ratings dip. The final station in the cluster WFNN did not show once again.

Although it’s difficult to analyze trends when you are looking at less than half of the listening, it is easy to gather that beyond the trend to listen to sources off the dial, there are now more choices on the dial that are competing for time spent listening. Add to it the nearly non-existent promotional and advertising budgets, and your product will lose market share.

As we get more information on the lay of the land in radio, we will share in an appropriate manner.

You can see the rankers at AllAccess.com (registration required).

The education reporter at the Erie Times-News, Sean McCracken told us this morning how the newspaper is deepening their commitment to social media, with nearly every reporter on staff now on Twitter. Of course, the paper itself, along with the TV newsrooms and early-adopter reporters have been tweeting for a while now (we’ve been tweeting since April 2009), and most have accompanying Facebook pages that roll stories and ask for input from readers and viewers (and some listeners of radio stations).

The question today is, how are you interacting with old-school media’s leveraging of social media? You can choose as many answers as you like, and weigh in on the comments.

Robin Soslow, the Impulsive Traveler, ventured to Erie to experience the ice dunes of Presque Isle State Park last January (a more typical winter than what we are having), and says

And the adjacent town of Erie is so rich in man-made spectacles that I made a second visit last month.

Now that’s something the Chamber can crow about. Read her quite flattering portrayal of our town here.

This huge move comes in the middle of a timeline of major changes to the landscape of the FM dial that began in late 2011 with the move-in of Family Life Network’s WCGM, with a Class A signal on 102.7 that moved from Clarendon to Wattsburg. They continue into the new year with the launch of First Channel Communications 92.7/Lawrence Park sometime in 2012. Finally, Family Life has a CP for Gannon WERG’s old 89.9 frequency, now permitted for Cambridge Springs, with a tower location in Edinboro.

Of course, with all but one of these new frequencies is the strong certainty of format. Rocket will be classic rock, and FLN will continue its light contemporary Christian and talk format. What we are  uncertain on but have a good hunch is the format for the 92.7 station. The lead format horse in that derby is a direct CHR/Top 40 competitor to Star 104.

We’ll keep listening for details on all these upcoming changes to a radio near you.

You can view a gallery of those pages by clicking this link: Go to Newseum: Today’s Front Pages: Pennsylvania

After you’ve looked at how this story was covered, please compare, contrast and comment here at P& T.