C-Suite decision makers and meeting planners are busy, intelligent people, looking to help their company thrive in the future. Las Vegas has been a long-standing player in the meeting space for years and often doesn’t make it into their consideration set because of preconceived notions – they know Las Vegas (at least based on their own leisure experiences). Their biggest concern: The energy of Vegas will distract from critical meetings. Yet these same individuals acknowledge that there are positive benefits to the destination’s unique energy, including the opportunity to be inspired by new perspectives, productivity and creativity. Las Vegas didn’t need to be introduced as a world-class meetings destination, but reintroduced to those who thought they knew what having a meeting in Vegas meant. Because as soon as that curiosity peaked, planners and executives alike would allow Las Vegas back onto their consideration set once again.

When it comes to moving business forward, big reward requires a bit of risk. Our audience is aware of who Las Vegas is; we needed to prove the energy of the city is the secret ingredient for deeper connections and inspired meeting attendees. The creative positions Las Vegas as a city built for bold thinking, brave behavior and challenged decision makers to take a stand by choosing Las Vegas. This approach also uniquely set the destination uniquely apart from competitive markets like Chicago and Orlando.

The campaign, titled “Not Invited,” draws a metaphorical line in the sand for businesses. While everyone is invited to Las Vegas, the characteristics that hold back innovation and visionary thinking are not. So, “average” isn’t invited to Las Vegas. The status quo and mediocrity? They aren’t invited either.

Extensive research with meetings planners, decision makers and attendees was conducted in 2019 just prior to the world shutting down in 2020 and continued throughout the pandemic. Research highlighted the opportunity to create curiosity about Las Vegas that directly challenged what target audiences believed they already knew. In the end, it’s not just about planning a meeting in Las Vegas. It’s about what happens as a result of “being in Las Vegas”—the distinctive outcomes such as facilitating “lightbulb moments,” inspiration, and innovation… along with energizing attendees and teams. The destination’s unique and inherent energy and excitement needed to be reframed and conveyed in creative messaging as these positive catalysts for businesses—deep truths that were not top-of-mind. Additionally, building on the destination’s energy as the foundation for messaging allowed for shared equity with the leisure brand—no longer were they at odds with each other.

Reaching meeting planners is challenging outside of endemic meeting planner publishers; however, those publishers do not have the same technologies and abilities as mainstream media. Working as true partners with industry publishers, new paid opportunities were built specifically for the Not Invited campaign – site skin takeovers and first-impression units. Never-done-before media placements on trusted sites, paired with high-impact placements and unique creative messaging, allowed Las Vegas to spark curiosity and disrupt assumptions on meetings in Las Vegas. In addition to large-scale media placements, first-party partner data was used to reach planners and executives across digital, audio and social, utilizing a combination of targeting tactics including competitively conquesting planners actively looking at non-Las Vegas meeting venues.

Secured significant high-profile new 2024 tradeshow business, luring multiple tech giants away from their home bases in the Bay Area including ComplexCon, converging the world's most influential brands/artists, and one of the largest tech conferences globally, a still confidential but hugely notable win for Vegas as the brand is one of the most progressive in the US.

Paid KPIs: Reach, garnering 81.3M impressions across 16 partners in 6 months. High-impact digital placements delivered 18% higher CTR than standard digital, proving the mix of high-impact units and new opportunities delivered above standard inventory. Mix of high-impact and highly targeted video delivered 18% increase YoY in video completion rates, while keeping cost per completes flat YoY.

Public Relations:15 placements, 6.2 million impressions, total publicity value: $10,463.

Web traffic: increased with 30% of all sessions during the flight attributed to the campaign. Average session duration was comparable to other site pages at 1:20.