Random Thoughts: Smarter Media Spend

In case you missed it, the Orlando Sentinel had a little snippet about the LVCVA this week.

...Las Vegas, spent $123.6 million on marketing and advertising during the fiscal year that ended June 30. Vegas is seeing almost no growth in its visitor count through May, while hotel occupancy has dipped 1.9% compared with the first five months of last year.

Now, we are certainly not saying the money was not well spent, (not to mention the economy, gas prices, airlines, etc, etc, etc.) but with numbers and quotes like that, you could understand how a non-travel industry person could jump to such a conclusion. Which we all know is the incorrect one, tourism marketing / advertising is critical to every DMO and CVB.

Perhaps the industry should be focusing on how we are spending our money, rather than how much money we have to spend.

Easier said than done, to be sure.

Travel Trends - hotels.com, My Vegas

Hotels.com New Logo - hotels.com, the low price travel search engine from expedia inc., is trading in its bellman logo for something a bit more refined. As reported by several blogs, including HotelChatter, Trademork.com and Logo Design Works (all of which contain some interesting observations), as well as verified by your author via CNN last night (they had a new commercial), it would appear that the logo on the right will slowly become the new logo for the company. Although, during the TV spot, the new logo was orange, not black.
http://www.hotelchatter.com/

My Vegas - Is the social-networking band-wagon full yet? Apparently not...the latest entry to the race for your free time is Las Vegas. According to Brandweek, the LVVCA is launching a new 'My Vegas' section on visitlasvegas.com. The site, according to the article (the new social-networking piece was not live as of this article) contains your typical social-networking features...profile page, upload photos, talk to friends, etc...and encourages you to use a 'Vegas' persona (read, fake) when signing up (because no one lies about themselves on MySpace right now).

While I am sure the site and execution will be very good, I wonder how many people will create another social networking profile for My Vegas. Personally, I think an embeddable 'My Vegas' application...that let's you create a 'Vegas' persona...for Facebook or MySpace would be a better marketing opportunity in this situation. Rather than putting it behind a wall.
http://www.brandweek.com/

Travel Trends - Las Vegas, Earthmine

Las Vegas - To complement new 30 and 60 second spots debuting this week, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority introduced a new section of VisitLasVegas.com that allows visitors to loosen up by listening to their 'evil' side. The section, which is surprisingly sparse of content, features an email a friend function that lets users 'impose your free will' via an angel or devil personalized message. The email a friend feature is powered by Oddcast, which is famous for those creepy talking avatars.
http://www.visitlasvegas.com/

Earthmine - A great post from TechCrunch introduces us to another virtual mapping company called Earthmine. Simliar to other companies and projects in the virtual mapping field such as Microsoft's Photosynth and Everyscape, the introduction of Earthmine places yet more emphasis on a searchable visual world.
http://www.earthmine.com/