With discount airline Southwest Airlines last week announcing its plans to acquire its rival AirTran, Baltimore-area publishers and television stations will likely see a decline in their advertising dollars.

The acquisition of AirTran by Southwest will eliminate part of the competition at Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport; thereby implying that the combined airline would not need to spend as much on advertising as the two carriers did individually, in order to promote their services to the budget-conscious travelers of the area.

Talking about the impact of the Southwest-AirTran merger on the advertising dollars, Ed Callahan, a co-founder of Baltimore-based Planit ad agency, said that the advertising dollars that the carriers spent separately “could probably be used in another market, because they don’t have the competition here they once did.”

In consensus with Callahan’s statement, Erin Borkowski, VP and media director for another Baltimore ad firm TBC, said that Southwest will likely step up its ad spending in Atlanta and other new markets that it will enter as a result of its merger with AirTran.

However, noting that Southwest ads will not disappear from the local airwaves, even long after the merger, since Baltimore is one of the carrier’s biggest markets, Michele Selby, executive VP of Media Works, an Owings Mills media-buying firm, said: “There’s a lot that they need to tell people, so they’re going to continue to spend.”