Reno rules campaign targets budget tourism

The first round of an advertising campaign designed to woo travelers from the San Francisco area to Reno generated lots of Web traffic, but it's uncertain how much of that traffic turned into hotel bookings.

The second round of the campaign developed by the Reno/Sparks Convention and Visitors Authority in cooperation with six major hotel-casino properties started running two weeks ago in the San Francisco Chronicle and Bay Area television stations.

The first round, which ran from Jan. 26 through Feb. 22, generated about 11,000 visits to the campaign's Web site, renorules.com, says Michael Thomas, executive director of marketing for the RSCVA.

Of those visitors, about half 5,940 to be exact clicked through to learn about free-night offers from the six participating properties. They include the Silver Legacy, the Eldorado, Atlantis, John Ascuaga's

Nugget, the Peppermill and Circus Circus.

About 350 of them booked rooms through renorules.com.

That's not a great number, Thomas acknowledges. But tourism marketing executives think it's possible that consumers go comparison shopping at other sites after they see the offer at renorules.com, and it's possible that the campaign is creating more hotel business than the numbers would indicate.

"We felt that any incremental business was a win," Thomas said. "It's encouraging that the campaign performed as we expected it to."

He said RSCVA officials wanted to keep a lid on expectations, especially in light of the economic downturn.

Glenn Carano, who heads marketing for the Silver Legacy, says the campaign is bringing some positive energy about Reno into one of its most important tourism markets.

"It's a cool campaign," Carano says. "They did a good job with the creative. It's putting Reno into the view of a key market."

The economic downturn accounts for the generous offer a free night's stay offered by the hotels that are helping to fund the Reno Rules campaign.

"It had to be strong enough," Thomas says. Each property sets its own conditions on the offer.

RSCVA and its hotel partners are investing $185,000 in each of the four rounds of the campaign scheduled to run this year.

The second round of the campaign is fine-tuned to reflect the changing season and puts more emphasis on summertime special events in the Reno-Sparks market.

While it's running, RSCVA also is doing follow-up marketing with 6,100 consumers who have provided their e-mail addresses through the renorules.com site.

And it's also tracking any impact the campaign might have on visitrenotahoe.com, the agency's primary Web site. Traffic on that site spiked substantially in late January after the Bay Area campaign began running.

A key piece of the advertising strategy, Thomas said, is changing how people in the San Francisco and Sacramento areas think about Reno especially since the community's renaissance took full flower in the past five years.

"As Reno has changed, the perceptions have not changed in our core drive markets," the RSCVA executive says. "They don't believe we have what we have."

The advertising campaign is rooted in data collected by EMC Research Inc. of Oakland, Calif., last year.

That research found that the Reno tourism market has potential among northern California consumers looking for a quick and affordable getaway. But it also found that consumers who haven't been to the area for a few years often don't have a favorable opinion of the Reno-Sparks area.