St. Louis  is a city rich in commercial history. Situated along the Mississippi River, it once was the center of the fur trade and later became home to entrepreneurs selling their wares to frontiersmen passing through the "gateway to the West." 
    The city blossomed as first steamboats and then railroads brought more people, and thus more commerce and industry, to its borders.
    Today, as the long-time headquarters of Anheuser-Busch and its Budweiser brand, St. Louis is still known for an industry that made it famous early this century: liquor. But it is also an auto-manufacturing center, with Ford, Chrysler and GM plants, and is home to upstart Internet companies like MAX Broadcasting Network, a new media company that owns sites like MaxFootball.com and MaxBaseball.com.
    Bank of America and Boeing, which records the history of aviation at the James S. McDonnell Prologue Room at the Lambert-St. Louis International Airport, also have a presence in the city. (McDonnell-Douglas was based in St. Louis before its merger with Boeing.) And although St. Louis lost the nation's oldest professional football franchise, the Cardinals, to Arizona in 1988, it still boasts a proud sports tradition.
     The St. Louis-based Sporting News named its hometown the Best Sports City  this year. That distinction is hard to question when the St. Louis Rams, who moved to town in 1995, gave the city its first Super Bowl in 2000 and in mid-September was off to a 3-0 start, when home-run record-holder Mark McGwire and the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team were bound for the playoffs, and when the St. Louis Blues regularly rank among the nation's best hockey teams.
    To a great extent, the media market in St. Louis revolves around the city's professional sports teams.  But the automotive sector also accounts for up to 40 percent of the media dollars spent in the city, says Jay Goldman, president of A&JG Media.
     Yet despite a robust economy in St. Louis, sources say local ad buying have been on the downswing. Even the locally based dot.coms have been spending their ad dollars nationally rather than in St. Louis.
    Coleman Steele, the media director for Veritas Advertising, credits the slow market to numerous factors. D'Arcy, for instance, had been the largest buyer in St. Louis for years. But when the agency moved its headquarters to New York early in the last decade, it took much of the buying with it.
     St. Louis also has lost the headquarters of Blockbuster and Southwestern Bell.
     "The market isn't as healthy as it once was," Steele says. "It's just been one thing after another."
    Bob Kochan,  of Kochan & Co. and  president of the Advertising Club of Greater St. Louis, paints a brighter picture. He agrees that the city is not experiencing a boom market for large advertisers. But he says that it does offer buyers more venues for their ad dollars than in the past and that it is a market of continued growth that rarely experiences decline.

RADIO
    Radio is the most volatile sector in the St. Louis media market right now. The major players are shuffling the broadcast deck to try to maximize new and existing audiences.
    Sinclair Broadcast Group has abandoned radio in the city and elsewhere as it changes its focus to TV. Bonneville International, meanwhile, is the newest entrant. In June, it announced  the purchase of four St. Louis radio stations, WIL-FM, WKKX-FM, WVRV-FM and WRTH-AM, from Emmis Communications Corp., which still retains a radio presence in St. Louis.
     Absher says there is "a huge chess game taking place in the market for music stations." The maneuvering presumably will result in numerous format changes and competition for ad dollars. "It's going to be a lot of fun to watch," Absher says.
     For now, Infinity Broadcasting-owned KMOX-AM's news/talk/sports format is king. With Rush Limbaugh and Cardinals baseball among its programming, "The Voice of St. Louis" remains a perennial market leader, a fact reflected in its ad rates.
     "Where they charge $400," says Scott Spencer, media director for Maring Kanefield & Weissman, "the next station might charge $250." And with the Cardinals in the playoffs, Spencer adds, a 10-second spot on radio skyrocketed to $900, up from $450 in the regular season.

PRINT
    The big news in print is Pulitzer's purchase  last month of Suburban Journals of Greater St. Louis. Its 38 weekly papers and other publications have become part of a newspaper empire whose flagship publication is the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
     The Post-Dispatch is the only daily left in town since Pulitzer bought out and folded the old St. Louis Globe-Democrat in the mid-1980s. In May, the Herald Co. sold all but 5 percent of its remaining stake in the Globe-Democrat to Pulitzer, so the company now has a virtual monopoly on the St. Louis print market.
    The closest thing to a competitor for Pulitzer in St. Louis is the Belleville News-Democrat on the Illinois side of the metropolitan area, where the Post-Dispatch also circulates. 
      "This used to be a two-newspaper town," laments Veritas' Steele. "There's no competition here now."
    Other print markets include the St. Louis Business Journal, one of several papers published in major cities across the nation by American City Business Journals, and The Riverfront Times, an alternative paper that, like its New Times sister publications in other metro areas, skews toward a younger, entertainment-oriented audience.

OUTDOOR
     Outdoor advertising has become a political flashpoint in St. Louis this year. For the first time, the environmentally conscious anti-billboard group Scenic Missouri has managed to get an initiative on the statewide ballot that would mandate the removal of up to thousands of boards in St. Louis and beyond.
    Proposition A understandably has Infinity Outdoor Inc. and DDI Media, who dominate the outdoor market St. Louis, on edge. The Outdoor Advertising Association of America and Citizens Against Tax Waste are fighting the initiative, arguing that it would cost state taxpayers $500 million and hurt the state's economy.
    Outdoor advertising is not limited to the 14-foot by 48-foot billboards that have become a target of environmental ire, however. 
    Adamson Advertising's Dieckgraefe says Obie Media has been working the transit advertising market in St. Louis aggressively since recently taking over the contract for Metro Link.
    Meanwhile, Wall USA, which entered the market two to three years ago, has found a way around zoning laws designed to curb obtrusive outdoor advertising. It has infiltrated hot suburban markets like Creve Coeur and Chesterfield Valley to build bus stops with poster advertising opportunities on them.

Freelance writer and editor K. Daniel Glover lives in Northern Virginia. 

                               INCOME

Per capita income for the metropolitan region
$22,700
	1992

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