R&R gets three-year extension on LVCVA ad contract

By Richard N. Velotta

Friday, April 17, 2009 | 2 a.m.

With centuries of institutional experience in the crowd, members of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority did what just about everybody expected them to do when it came to deciding whether to extend the contract of longtime advertising and marketing consultant R&R Partners.

After a 90-minute presentation by R&R principal Billy Vassiliadis, the board voted unanimously to give the company a three-year contract extension with an option for an additional three years. The contract is valued at more than $90 million.

R&R has had a hammerlock on the authority’s ad contract for 29 years.

In the last four months, a conservative watchdog group has scrutinized the relationship between the state’s largest ad agency and the quasi-government entity.

The Nevada Policy Research Institute criticized R&R’s deal with the authority and scolded both for a lack of transparency in a Dec. 3 report with updates Feb. 4, Feb. 16 and April 9. In the most recent update, the institute said R&R has failed to quantify the effect its ad buys have had on driving tourists to Las Vegas.

That was one of several points addressed by Vassiliadis in his video-laden presentation, which was requested last month by Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman, chairman the convention authority’s board.

Vassiliadis called the deal his company has with the authority “an irreplaceable partnership” with values of insight, commitment and passion.

He discussed the company’s history with the authority and documented how R&R-led strategies resulted in visitation spikes.

He dwelled on the company’s award-winning “What happens here, stays here” ad campaign, promising to bring it back by summer. He also talked about how R&R has kept up with communications technology and kept Las Vegas in front of viewers, listeners and readers in various telecommunications channels.

He also reviewed R&R’s track record in managing crisis communication, noting that Las Vegas usually is the first to react and the first to recover.

At several points in his presentation, Vassiliadis paused to note the multiples of return on investment. For example, he said the recent partnership the authority developed with Sports Illustrated and Southwest Airlines to wrap a plane with images of a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model and stage the coming-out party in Las Vegas resulted in $19 million in earned media value and a 17-to-1 return on investment.

Vassiliadis gave a few hints about what the agency has planned for summer and beyond. He said the agency would continue to be nimble in developing messages to match the fast-changing needs of the destination based on the economy. He said he hopes to continue to focus on hitting all communications channels to keep Las Vegas in the public eye and he said he wants the LVCVA board to consider expanding its e-commerce opportunities by selling or hiring a contractor to sell hotel rooms directly on the Internet.

The entire R&R debate was played out before more than a dozen former board members and authority executives, who were invited to participate in a 50th anniversary celebration of the agency.

Following board business, former and current board members and executives deposited mementos in a time capsule that will be preserved for a 2059 opening.

In other business at the April 14 meeting, the board approved a resolution of support for the Nevada Tourism Commission encouraging state lawmakers to keep the agency independent of the Nevada Economic Development Commission and to maintain the existing funding strategy.

The board also approved a convention attendance promotion services contract with Toronto-based Infolink Technologies. Under terms of the $375,000 deal, an Infolink call center in Toronto will place more than half a million phone calls to potential conventiongoers for 23 Las Vegas events.