So here's the situation: The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority is funded by taxes on the rooms at local resorts and then uses those tax dollars to get people to come here and stay in the rooms at local resorts and thus contribute tax dollars that enable the LVCVA to get more people to come here and stay in the rooms at local resorts.
In this veritable Olympics of mutual back-scratching, the LVCVA has scored a considerable success with its "What Happens Here, Stays Here" ad campaign, which was the brainchild of R&R Partners, a local advertising agency that the LVCVA pays quite well—$66.5 million a year, they say—to keep the brainchildren coming. The LVCVA, though, recently gave rights to the slogan back to R&R for a dollar, apparently, as Las Vegas Sun columnist Jeff German recently wrote, so that R&R could sue trademark infringers and collect the booty from said suits.
It is not clear whether LVCVA President Rossi Ralenkotter and R&R Chief Executive Billy Vassiliadis failed to anticipate the critical dog pile that would follow or whether they anticipated it and decided to just take their licks. In any case, they've answered the public howls with the calm pose of two seasoned businessmen who roll their eyes and tutor the untutored: This is all quite reasonable, and if you understood our business, you'd understand that. Vassiliadis told the Sun that the LVCVA doesn't have the manpower to monitor and fight trademark infractions. R&R does, though, and it can't legally fight infringements unless it owns the trademarks being infringed upon. R&R, he said, needed the LVCVA's rights to the slogan in order to help the LVCVA defend its rights to the slogan.
This might sound a bit like selling your child in order to prevent a kidnapping, but if you bend down and tilt your head and look at it from a particular angle, it's just Client Service 101: For 25 years R&R has done rather well selling its ideas to the LVCVA, and it makes sense that R&R would want to see to it, on the LVCVA's behalf, that those ideas are protected. What's more, Vassiliadis says that R&R would never try to profit from its ownership of the slogan. The problem is that, verbal assurances notwithstanding, the agreement contains the words "LVCVA hereby assigns and transfers to R&R ... all right, title and interest held by LVCVA in and to the Marks." Imagine, if you will, a palace coup, in which the noble Vassiliadis no longer nobly presides over his kingdom, and an evil man with an eye patch (not you, Norm!) takes over and decides to profit from his company's legal possession of the words, "What happens here, stays here." How do you like them apples?
Ralenkotter has an answer.
"We still own the work product," he told the Sun. "If there is any profit from the use of that mark, it will come back to the LVCVA. If we terminated the contract with R&R Partners, the work product would belong to us."
Take that, evil usurper!
Despite Ralenkotter's explanation, the controversy continues. This might be because the explanation doesn't explain everything to the critics' satisfaction—what about those lawsuit proceeds, which the agreement specifically assigns to R&R? Why, with all those room-tax dollars, doesn't the LVCVA have the manpower to fight trademark infringements on its own? Or the controversy might continue because it's just the sort of controversy—a real outrage magnet, this one—that is particularly useful for local politicians. Both mayors Goodman and Gibson have jumped aboard the we've-got-to-look-into-this chorus, and state Sen. Bob Beers has wisely suggested that the whole mess be resolved by adding a clause to the agreement that makes clear that all proceeds from marketing the slogan should wind up in the coffers of the LVCVA.
From such common sense, future campaign fliers are born.
If there is one thing eminently clear in all of this, it is that the LVCVA is not some socialistic fifth column out to suck the vitality from the American free enterprise system, but rather a tax-supported organization devoted to helping wealthy enterprises grow still wealthier. All of this, of course, is done in the public interest, as reflected in the following slogan, which I'll sell the LVCVA for a buck: "Serving the Powerful so the Powerful Can Serve You." (Rough draft: "Using Your Tax Dollars to Promote the Casino Industry.") For this reason, it seemed a bit odd when Las Vegas Sands President William Weidner declared last week, in Singapore of all places, that because he is "a free-market capitalist kind of guy," he disapproves of involvement of the quasi-public LVCVA in promoting the city.
In reality, though, it's less odd than it seems: Sands Las Vegas (owners of the Venetian) understands that it has a competitive advantage with its large, centrally located convention center. What the LVCVA, with its promotion of the city as a whole, and its stewardship of the Las Vegas Convention Center in particular, does is ameliorate that advantage—level the playing field, if you will—and what does a free-market capitalist guy fear more than a level playing field?
Unless you're the free-market capitalist guy on the low side of the field, in which case you can always ask the LVCVA what else they're selling these days.