Information about Las Vegas isn’t hard to find.

Anything you want to know about Vegas, you can search for and uncover pretty easily. But what if you’re looking for EVERYTHING Vegas?

Welcome to VIVA, the new Las Vegas-branded content hub within LasVegas.com. On February 2, the Las Vegas team at R&R Partners launched the new, accentuated blog, which was developed to provide engaging and educational information to the online audience. With a uniquely visual and intuitive design, users can easily browse and explore topics that all contain a collection of digital content designed to further generate a sense of interest and excitement around the destination.

The necessity of creating a content hub was generated from the content marketing strategy that Las Vegas implemented to further reinforce positive association through branded experiences, ultimately supporting visitation goals. Through this strategy, the library of branded content began to grow, and required an evolution of the Las Vegas digital ecosystem, and VIVA was born!

Not only is valuable content created and housed on VIVA, but the R&R team also is looking at performance. Doing so will provide valuable insight into how the audience interacts with the content hub. For instance, identifying what types of content the audience finds more engaging, looking at what the audience is searching for, and finding out what type of device they’re using. As we monitor these metrics, we’ll be able to further optimize the site and provide a greater, more meaningful experience for our audience – with the ultimate goal of driving increased visitation.

Check it out at viva.lasvegas.com and see for yourself.

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.

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.

Great Work … Tough Decision

In each of the last five years, R&R Partners has awarded what we affectionately call The Big Fat Prize. It is an annual cash award presented to the team that created the campaign or initiative that most exemplified our philosophy of building and protecting our clients’ brands. Winning requires excellence in strategic insight and thinking, the quality of the work itself and, of course, results.

The rules are simple. Entries are limited to one 8 ½ x 11 page. No fewer than three, but no more than five, finalists are chosen to present to the judges. Presentations have one rule – they cannot exceed 30 minutes. The judges are president and chief brand officer Mary Ann Mele, SVP/strategic consulting David Ellis and me.

This year, seven entries were submitted, one of them delivered by Brandi Skrtich’s dog Buddy (a very good dog). Three were ultimately selected as finalists.

And so on Wednesday, February 17, teams representing the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s Nothing’s Sexier Than Saving Water Compliance Campaign, Boeing’s new corporate website, and the Clark County Animal Foundation’s In-Fur-mercial campaign brought their best to the judges in a series of three 30-minute presentations.

Then the hard work began. Never before in its Big Fat history has it been more difficult for the judges to choose a Big Fat Prize winner. For the SNWA, it was a campaign that overcame some early obstacles to ultimately create $14 million in earned media (40 times the media spend) and, most importantly, motivate Southern Nevadans to save more than 1.5 billion gallons of water in the span of just two weeks. Or the Boeing team, who was faced with the daunting task of consolidating 22 separate sites and more than 11,000 pages of content into one cohesive site of fewer than 1,000 pages with fully functional desktop, tablet and mobile versions. Finally, there was the Animal Foundation team, who tackled their pro bono project with virtually no budget whatsoever and managed to turn the fortunes of the client around with some of the most unexpected and inspired creative seen in that or any other category for quite some time. In fact, their use of the time-honored infomercial format to promote pet adoptions was so spot-on, they actually won a special award from the Electronic Retailing Association (basically, the infomercial industry) in a competition they didn’t even enter.

In truth, any of the finalists would have made a very appropriate Big Fat Prize winner. All three presentations were excellently done, every entry produced results that R&R will proudly promote well into the future, and the work at the center of each was strategically based and incredibly smart.

But the rules say we had to pick a winner, and after three days of thought and discussion, the SNWA finished ahead by the narrowest of margins. It was the toughest and closest call that the Big Fat judges have ever had to make.

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.

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.

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.