Author: R&R Partners

Success for Grupo Posadas, Petalo

CMV/R&R in Mexico City, one of R&R’s nine North American branches, has enjoyed recent success with new accounts.

Gamma – Grupo Posadas, the newest hotel brand of the largest resort chain in Mexico, had a major challenge: Branding. But with the help of CMV/R&R, after two months of influencers helping position the brand and strategies for organic growth, the brand’s account interaction on social networks more than quadrupled.

Another recent campaign for Kimberly-Clark brand Petalo was a different challenge entirely. CMV/R&R had to communicate the most important and basic characteristics of toilet paper to help this Kimberly-Clark brand resonate with Mexico consumers, particularly mothers.

Petalo was positioned as everything a mother is to her children – Soft. Efficient. Resistant. The campaign, titled “In Everything, Just Like You,” speaks directly to the target audience: the women who want to give their families the best and most cost-efficient products.

The TV spots went on air and were posted on YouTube in March, and have more than 2 million views, exceeding expectations and providing a strong campaign for Petalo.

Making Virtual Reality a Reality

With its amazing thrill rides, legendary nightclubs, world-famous resorts and high-end restaurants, Las Vegas is the perfect city to use a virtual reality technology platform to appeal to the next generation of travelers.

On behalf of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, R&R Partners worked to make this Vegas VR idea into a reality of its own. Our team created a 360-degree video rig and went to work shooting content panoramas that showcase Las Vegas in a way some have never seen.

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The next challenge: How to distribute it? R&R created VegasVR, a user-friendly application for Apple and Android devices to give users a glimpse of the Las Vegas experience from anywhere while providing great level of in-market immersion to a wide range of demographics.

Download it for yourself here and take Vegas for a spin!

Some of the app features:

  • Support for 360° panoramic video and VR Cinema
  • Use touch or gyroscope to control the video
  • Compatible with Google Cardboard/tray-based headsets
  • Share the Vegas VR app to Facebook, Twitter and email
  • Interactive 3D menu

From VR content acquisition to distribution, R&R has positioned the LVCVA brand among the very first adopters of what will eventually rock the travel industry. R&R has also paved the way with 360-degree/VR media buys, innovative partnerships and activation placements. Read more about VegasVR in the LA Times.

The most exciting part of all: This is just the beginning. From a production standpoint to a content distribution and interactive perspective, R&R has huge plans for the VegasVR app and campaigns in 2016. Stay tuned, because when it comes to Las Vegas adventure, soon you’ll be in for the virtual ride of your life.

 

 

R&R Employee of The Year Has The Wright Stuff

Congratulations to our director of strategic communications in Salt Lake City, Steve Wright, for earning R&R Partners’ Employee of the Year honors for 2015.

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Wright’s expertise in social cause public awareness campaigns such as the Parents Empowered Underage Drinking prevention campaign and the Utah Drive Sober or Get Pulled Over campaign have helped them receive national recognition.

With 10 years of service at R&R, Wright is very popular both with co-workers and clients. During his decade at R&R Partners, he has held positions including director of public affairs, group account director and his current role as director of strategic communications, where he personally manages more than $9.5 million in annual local billings.

Prior to working at R&R Partners, Wright received a bachelor’s degree in communications with an emphasis in advertising and business management. He also earned a master’s degree in professional communications.

 

Faraday Future – A Win For All Involved

Faraday Future was considering four U.S. sites for its billion-dollar manufacturing facility for electric vehicles. Nevada was chosen, contingent upon passage by the Legislature of an incentive package (re: taxes) to seal the deal.

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That was the easy part. Once Nevada was selected, R&R Partners had to navigate a multitude of pieces of this puzzle. We worked with the city of North Las Vegas to ensure its needs were met. We facilitated negotiations with the unions and Faraday Future to ensure we’d have Democratic support for passing the legislation, and resolved transparency issues to also ensure Republican support. We worked with the SNWA to facilitate water issues, given the site for the plant has no existing infrastructure. We worked to educate the client on how Nevada works, and what concessions it would need to make to secure the deal, helping them to avoid any political vulnerabilities. We media-trained and created messaging for the client to effectively communicate its position. We lobbied the Legislature to pass the necessary bills. In short, we tackled this issue from every angle to create an overall strategic plan for the client to be successful.

The results? The Legislature passed all the bills required for Faraday Future to bring its facility to Nevada. A couple of weeks later, it had an incredibly successful, long-awaited unveiling of its concept car at CES. And then Faraday Future hired us to continue to help navigate some of the commitments it made to the state as part of the deal, both GPA and PR services.

The Driving Force Behind Ford Vignale’s European Market Growth

How does Ford wow European driving enthusiasts and compete with the likes of BMW and Jaguar?

Make it powerful. Make it elegant. Make it timeless. That’s the new Ford Vignale.

The R&R engagement team has been selected once again to play a part in Ford’s European market growth by helping to expand its exclusive line of Vignale vehicles to four additional models over the next two years.

We got behind the wheel and designed and developed a Ford Vignale website, and created a new interactive kiosk design.

The new Boeing.com

During the past century, Boeing has earned a list of accolades longer than the wingspan of its 787 Dreamliner. A true trailblazer in aerospace innovation, space and security systems, the company needed a website that reflected its reputation as a cutting-edge, forward-looking brand, so they turned to us.

We reimagined Boeing’s digital brand experience from the ground up. Our design was built to organize the company’s impressive array of content – everything from its history to commercial, defense and space products – in a streamlined, easy-to-navigate format. We also matched Boeing’s innovative spirit with some innovations of our own, crafting pages like the 777X gallery experience, which provides a first-person scrolling parallax museum tour, and an interactive time line detailing descriptions of 87 years worth of strategic airpower. We’re proud to have been entrusted to build a site that one of the most inventive and state-of-the-art companies on the planet can be proud to share.

Don’t take it from us. Explore Boeing.com to see for yourself.

 

The purr-fect campaign

Since 1978, The Animal Foundation has found families for lovable dogs, cats and other pets without homes.

When they reached out to us, the organization was looking for a compelling message to help its incredible cause. And it’s a cause in desperate – and continuous – need of support. The number of homeless pets is overwhelming. With more than 45,000 unwanted, lost, neglected and abandoned animals every year, the challenge to find permanent homes for them and reduce the perpetual birthrate of unwanted animals through spaying and neutering is the ultimate goal of the foundation.

At the outset, R&R knew we wanted something different from the all-too-common, heart-tugging campaigns depicting our furry friends wandering the streets or locked behind bars in depressing animal shelters. R&R’s strategy instead was to build around messaging that identifies the benefits of pet ownership. Our job was to create a campaign that’s unexpected – one that breaks through with a lighthearted approach as it creates demand and identifies the organization’s mission to increase adoptions through the shelter.

After an agencywide brainstorm, inspired by all the ways that pets enrich our lives, we created a series of tongue-in-cheek “in-fur-mercials” outlining the benefits of pet ownership in inventive, humorous ways. Whether it’s your “personal-trainer dog” that demands you take him on walks or your early morning “cat alarm clock,” pets make our lives much more rewarding.

The results were exceptional. We received some earned media coverage from AdWeek, Agency Spy, Good.com, Shoot Online and TheDailyDoGooder.com.

On The Animal Foundation’s YouTube page, the two long-form videos we produced have garnered more than 150,000 views. But the biggest success came in social media through sponsored Facebook videos. Our “Pet Dog” video has been seen more than 6.1 million times.

We’re proud to have supported a cause that is near and dear to our hearts, garnering more than a few laughs along the way.

When Allegiant has an issue, its first call is to R&R Partners

Allegiant is a publicly traded, Las Vegas-based airline specializing in low-cost fares to traditionally underserved markets. A large part of its business is transporting passengers to high-volume tourist destinations like Las Vegas and Orlando.

Since 2012, Allegiant pilots have been represented by the Teamsters union. Negotiations on a new contract between the airline and its pilots has been ongoing, and in January 2015, union members voted in favor of a strike, and asked permission from federal officials to do so.

Matters came to a head in March 2015, when Allegiant learned that the Teamsters planned an immediate strike to disrupt Easter holiday weekend travel – 250 flights, thousands of passengers, and many stranded or unable to reach their holiday destination. With just three days to develop a response, the R&R team began working side by side with Allegiant executives on how to handle a still-developing situation.

Communications would have to be maintained across several different audiences. Allegiant passengers, employees, regulators, airport partners, elected officials – all would have to be kept up to date and engaged in the event of a systemwide strike. With a suspected strike action on Thursday, R&R team members began working out of Allegiant HQ on Monday, fully integrating with the Allegiant communications team.

We decided to pre-empt the Teamsters’ disruptive action on April 1, 2015. The company publicly announced that it believed such action was imminent and advised travelers that it would issue full refunds to anyone who may be affected over the next seven days. We used the company’s social media channels to point confused or worried passengers to resources that could help them. Allegiant’s proactive communications efforts gave the company control of the public conversation and earned it the trust and respect of its passengers.

R&R developed a crisis-specific microsite for passengers, which kept its heavy traffic away from the main Allegiant website. The site provided answers to frequently asked questions about the unfolding situation. Most importantly, we developed a capability within the microsite for passengers to email the Teamsters’ leadership, asking them not to strike and to return to the bargaining table. This functionality ensured that passenger frustration was focused away from the airline, insulating the company’s brand from negative customer feelings. Over the duration of the crisis, Allegiant passengers sent nearly 1,500 separate communications to Teamsters officials, with many of them detailing their specific travel plans and the hardship the strike would cause.

Taking the lead in messaging to the media allowed Allegiant to control the narrative, positioning them as the responsible advocate for thousands of passengers. Throughout the day, constant communication to elected officials, regulators and the media kept Allegiant in the positive light. By the end of the day, Allegiant had received a restraining order against the Teamsters, preventing a strike. No flights needed to be cancelled, and the tens of thousands of passengers were able to make it to their destinations as planned.

Immediately after the crisis was averted, Allegiant COO Steve Harfst emailed the R&R team: “We could not have achieved what we did without you. You helped us stay ahead, controlling the messaging, and helped us protect our brand and reputation with our customers.”

The greatest indicator of success came the following week, with the rate of bookings on Allegiant actually rising, the brand maintaining the full confidence of its customers.

 

How to Harness the Full Potential of Your Data to Gain Insights or There are Truffles Down There Somewhere, We Just Gotta Sniff ‘Em Out

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You’ve been in the meeting before. You’re sitting down with a client or your executive team presenting your work, showing your metrics and then someone asks the question: “So… what does this actually mean for us?”

As the volume of data available to marketers expands by the day fundamental questions persist. How do we move from reporting data to developing meaningful insights? How do we know what data to focus on and how to apply it? How do we calculate the impact of our efforts. How? How? How? The answers are forthcoming in this new piece by R&R Partner’s Marketing Analytics Director, Justin Gilbert, recently published in PR News.

Get the whole story on Actionable Data Analysis as published in PR News by R&R Partners’ Justin Gilbert here.

Indy status helps R&R Partners stay nimble, deliver international reach.

indy_helps_internationalMembership in an organization must be advantageous to both parties. One should reflect the thinking and aspirations of the other. For R&R, membership in Worldwide Partners, Inc. (WPI), the largest network of owner-operated, independently run advertising and marketing communications companies in the world, is like being friends with 80+ agencies, across 50 countries on seven continents.

We bring our strengths in tourism, moving products off of shelves and changing opinions in the political arena in exchange for a host of mutual benefits. Through our WPI partnership, we’re afforded a bigger, broader, global reach in terms of research, innovative services and real-time collaboration efforts. As our clients’ service needs go international, our partnership allows us to tap into a rich resource of viewpoints, experiences and cultural insights with boots-on-the-ground contacts in any number of markets clients might be considering. It’s like a kind of gut-check, clearer picture look of our client’s strategies and the media landscape wrapped up in a thing they call a home advantage.

Working closely with eight partner agencies across the globe on behalf of a number of our clients including the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority and Western Digital, among others, we are able to deliver the quality of work, service and partner successes in a way that only a network of like-minded independent agency partners can. And it empowers us to consider new business prospects in categories and markets we haven’t yet explored.

As we grow, we relish our independence. With the flexibility to make decisions and change directions on a dime – unlike companies publicly held or limited by a board of directors – we are able to do the right thing for our clients, like quickly capitalize on a shift in consumer behaviors or more thoroughly and efficiently analyze a markets’ viability with the help of our independent network relationships.

Building upon and improving member relationships is one of the highlights for the organization each year. For 2014, Las Vegas was selected as the worldwide meeting site (we didn’t apply any pressure or wild promises). And what a meeting it was. Needless to say, it was one of their most well attended WPI conferences to date.

The meeting allowed R&R Partners to us showcase Las Vegas in a way that only we could, and introduce ourselves to members we hadn’t met and further develop our relationships and ties with the organization. We had the opportunity to host an evening cocktail reception in our Las Vegas headquarters for more than 100 conference attendees. We also were able to provide a little behind the scenes magic with a special Q&A session with one of Cirque du Soleil’s artistic directors following the performance of the extravaganza, Zarkana.

For us, the highlight of the evening was when we were chosen to receive the 2014 “Perfect Partner Award.” This Worldwide Partners award is given to partner agencies that receive perfect feedback from other partner agencies within the network. The award recognizes those agencies that are seen as progressive and innovative.