LVCVA details ad campaign with goal of drawing 43 million

Wednesday, May 11, 2005 | 10:47 a.m.

When Rossi Ralenkotter announced in January that the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority hopes to attract 43 million people to Las Vegas by 2009, he promised comprehensive details about how that would occur with the publication of the LVCVA's marketing plan.

Tuesday, Ralenkotter, president and chief executive of the LVCVA, Terry Jicinsky, senior vice president of marketing for the organization, and representatives of R&R Partners, the LVCVA's contracted advertising agency, unveiled the road map to the goal.

The 120-page plan, summarized in a 90-minute multimedia presentation, contains new variations on some familiar themes: The LVCVA will seek out new and repeat visitors, grow the Las Vegas brand and target leisure, meetings and international markets with a combination of advertising and public relations initiatives based on research.

At the center of the blitz will be the LVCVA's popular and successful "What happens here, stays here" media campaign. But Billy Vassiliadis, R&R's chief executive, said intense competition is resulting in a greater urgency to deliver results.

"We never rest," Vassiliadis told the board of directors in his presentation. "We're working with greater intensity and more focus than ever before" as a result of competition, primarily from other gaming venues and the cruise-ship industry.

While casting an advertising net in key feeder markets and appealing to the meetings and conventions industry to give Las Vegas a try isn't a new strategy, some of the details of the plan are. Among them:

Vassiliadis said research is key to making decisions about marketing the destination and R&R's Mary Ann Mele explained that the agency has identified five different types of Las Vegas visitor to reach with various messages.

For each type of visitor, R&R has researched demographics, travel preferences, gaming preferences, Internet use habits, the type of magazines they read, TV networks they watch, radio networks they listen to and what shows they'll watch from the prime-time TV lineup.

Here are the different types of Las Vegas visitors, through the eyes of R&R research: