• by Tameka Kee , May 8, 2008

The Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Las Vegas is enticing the beautiful people to come to Rehab--a long-running, Sunday night pool party--with a new microsite and viral app designed by IdeaWork.

Santa Barbara, Calif.-based IdeaWork has handled the Vegas Hard Rock's online marketing business--including core Web site design, microsites for the Rehab and Body English events, rich media, as well as some SMS- and print-based campaigns--for the past five years. So when the interactive agency pitched the idea of a viral promotion to launch the new Rehab site, complete with a portable girl-on-girl pool fight application--the hotel and casino's marketing brass gave them carte blanche.

"We've been working with them for five years, so our relationship is pretty good," said Jay Schwartz, president of IdeaWork. "They tend to give us a lot of freedom to come up with ideas, concepts and their executions."

For the fifth installment of the Rehab microsite, IdeaWork developed a chicken-fight mini game, which lets users play against each other as bikini-clad women duke it out against the backdrop of the Vegas Hard Rock's pool. In addition to the girl-fight app, the Rehab site features info about the upcoming week's party, and candid photos of the previous week's partiers. Visitors have the option to share the chicken-fight game via email, as well as port their party pics to Facebook and MySpace.

Schwartz said that generating new subscribers and increasing time spent on site were the primary goals for the campaign, "though the metrics for those goals aren't specifically set in stone." The agency has also crafted a number of rich media and print ads to support the microsite's launch--and the Vegas Hard Rock's in-house marketing team handles the media planning and buying themselves.

Other IdeaWork clients include Harrah's, MGM Mirage and Cirque du Soleil.