Goodman seeks more oversight of ad agency

The advertising agency behind the "what happens here, stays here," Las Vegas ad campaign might be getting more frequent oversight.

Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman says the agency R&R Partners, which developed the famous slogan as a contractor for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, has done good work promoting the destination.

But he also said recently that R&R's contract should be reviewed on an annual basis, which would be a departure from the agency's previous five-year deals with the authority.

"My personal feeling is that long contracts are probably not in everybody's best interest," Goodman said Thursday. "If you give an extended contract, you have to have year-to-year renewals."

But Goodman, who is also chairman of the authority's board of directors, stopped short of calling for open bidding for the authority's lucrative advertising business.

"You always like new ideas but you don't want to fix something that's not broken either," he said.

In fiscal year 2009 alone, the current R&R contract, which dates back to 1999, was worth an estimated $87 million.

It expires in June and has been the subject of sporadic controversy, most recently late last year after the conservative group Nevada Policy Research Institute, criticized the authority and R&R for having an overly cozy relationship.

The authority is now in the position of deciding whether to renew the deal with R&R or initiate an open-bidding process for other companies to have a shot at the contract.