Web Design Case Study: Brand Building

To further promote "what happens" in Vegas, R&R Partners teamed with design firm Critical Mass to create an interactive trip-planning site

by Matt Vella

When the Las Vegas Convention & Visitors Authority launched its cheeky "What Happens Here, Stays Here" campaign in January, 2003, it hoped the sassy slogan would help boost sagging post-September 11 tourism and recast Sin City as an adult playground where vacationers could throw off their taboos and inhibitions without consequence. Little did the group entrusted with managing the Vegas brand imagine the phrase would spread like a Western wildfire, ultimately taking a place in the popular lexicon alongside marketing taglines like "Just Do It" and "Got Milk?"

But the group's research showed that while consumers were intrigued, they were also turned off by the practicalities of planning a trip to experience the city's temptations (roughly 20% of Vegas visitors are first-timers). "We had the push effect of television, the ads creating the desire in people to come," says Sean Corbett, director of digital marketing at R&R Partners, the Las Vegas firm that created the campaign. "We turned to the Web to help people plan, pull them in, and, essentially, rationalize potential visitors' urge to come."

Working with the design firm Critical Mass, R&R set about devising a set of Web-based tools to act as a digital enabler—and an extended brand-building tool for Las Vegas. The result, My Vegas, was launched earlier this year. It's a location-specific social networking Web site that lives within the broader VisitLasVegas.com. "Our key insight in designing the site," says David Armano, Critical Mass vice-president for experience design, "is that people come to Vegas from all over and that most people are coordinating their trips with friends over e-mail."

Tweak the Look and Feel

Such organizing can quickly become unwieldy and is frankly too Web 1.0 for words. So Critical Mass set out to design a site that would streamline would-be visitors' planning process but maintain the frisky tone of the original campaign. Like other social sites such as Facebook or MySpace (NWS), MyVegas features profiles that users can customize by tweaking the look and feel of pages, adding and sharing picture albums of trips, and, of course, accessing the pervasive comment that makes up the chatter on most social networks. "But," says Armano, "this is not just social advertising." He points to a long list of practical features geared toward helping potential visitors.

For instance, My Vegas contains an arcade of Web applications that are also designed to reinforce the tongue-in-cheek brand work of the original advertising. The most robust of these, dubbed RSVP for "Really Simple Vegas Planner," allows groups of friends to co-create a detailed itinerary of their trips, hour by hour, adding details of hotel stays, special events, and restaurant and club outings, for example. Users in a group can even vote for or veto proposed events, times, or locations. Brightly colored motion graphics replete with miniature fireworks animations give the site's user interface a sense of dynamism and fun.

Other applications are more frivolous, including Be Anyone, which allows users to create detailed fake personas for use on an uninhibited night out. Another, dubbed Free Will, lets members create customized video messages hosted by angels or devils to encourage friends to join the site by extolling the potential virtues or vices of a given plan. And the Vegas Name Generator creates gag names for visitors to hide behind.

To date, the site has attracted some 8,500 members. About 60% have clicked through to hotel sites from the RSVP application, according to Corbett, though it's impossible to tell, of course, how many actually booked a room. To help the site grow, more features are planned. In the coming year, functionality will be broadened to integrate with desktop calendars such as Microsoft (MSFT) Outlook as well as modules for Facebook and Google (GOOG) Gadgets. That could help create lucrative repeat visitors out of members. "Ultimately," says Corbett, "the site isn't in the business of selling anything. We're just trying to further engage consumers with the Vegas brand."

Vella is a writer for BusinessWeek.com in New York.