Lone Star Company plays Texas Hold 'Em.
The woman sounds nice enough. At least for an android. Her computerized voice is firm, but compassionate to a caller's plight.
"The number, 424-4996, has been temporarily disconnected," she instructs. "No further information is available about this number."
Don't harm the messenger. It's not her fault the company in charge of luring visitors to Santa Fe isn't more, um, welcoming. But the message nonetheless symbolizes why many people who suckle from the teat of local tourism have a bad taste in their mouths over the City of Santa Fe's impending renewal of a contract with Maverick Advertising to direct the marketing campaign for the Convention and Visitors Bureau.
The company responsible for representing Santa Fe doesn't currently have a representative living within 600 miles of the city. But proximity isn't the only grievance that some members of Santa Fe's business community have with the Dallas-based Mavericks.
"It was depressing to see that their contract is going to be renewed," says Michael Carroll, president of the Santa Fe Gallery Association. "I don't feel like [Maverick] has been effective at all and neither do most of the people I talk to. Not just in the galleries but throughout the hospitality and tourism industry."
Maverick is nevertheless all but ensured of manning the CVB's advertising helm for a fourth consecutive year after the $933,827 contract is approved at the May 25 City Council meeting. The company signed a standard contract of one year (at about $625,000) in 2002 with three options to renew, taking the reigns from Santa Fe's Impressions Advertising after that company handled the CVB's marketing duties for nearly a decade.
Carroll says the move was initially met with optimism but when the Maverick reign didn't appear to bear fruit-for the City's art scene in particular-concerns were met by a "wall of absolute indifference." Instead, businesses like his-the Turner-Carroll Gallery-have had to rely less on mass marketing and more on word-of-mouth advertising and dumb luck.
"When people walk into my gallery and say 'I had no idea all of this was here' it begins to press the issue that we aren't presenting to the rest of the world who we really are," Carroll says. "It seems that people who come to Santa Fe really have no idea what they're going to find. Doesn't it make sense to represent who we really are?" CVB Executive Director Darlene Griego acknowledges the criticism about Maverick but says it has taken time to harvest the bounty Maverick has sown. "We completely changed the branding," Griego says. "We changed our focus. It takes about two years before you can really see the results of a shift like that and-right on schedule-last year we started seeing results."
In April, Santa Fe saw a jump of 5.1 percent in its lodging occupancy rate and a $10.37 increase in the average daily rate (expenditures per person) from April 2004. Griego says the decision to switch to Maverick came after those rates had slipped by about 2 percent every year from 1998 through 2001.
When Maverick was awarded the advertising contract in 2002 by an 11- member panel comprised of community members and City staff, the company simultaneously netted the $35,000-ayear contract to handle the CVB's Web site. Griego says the site recorded 3 million total hits in the fiscal year prior to Maverick taking over and has logged 37 million total hits from July 2004 through April 2005.
"There are a lot of things they've done that people don't necessarily notice," Griego says. "You're never going to please everyone. For the most part, the majority of the feedback we have received has been positive."
Griego says that the CVB-via Maverick-also has worked to upgrade its resources, transforming hard-copy guides to CD-ROM, upgrading the Web site and instituting a successful direct mail operation while scaling back its international advertising in favor of emphasizing a regional campaign and targeting select markets like New York City and Austin, Texas.
Maverick's ability to maintain a consistent and faithful marketing campaign for Santa Fe has been called into question, however, by upheaval within the company. Maverick Advertising was recently absorbed by another firm-Saunders- Ream-and the merger has put the validity of Maverick's contract with the CVB into question. Meanwhile, the company lost its lone representative in Santa Fe to attrition and relies, for now at least, on sending an account executive, Jack Yarbrough, to meet with CVB officials every couple of weeks. Yarbrough reiterates the successes cited by Griego, but acknowledges the importance of finding an on-site Maverick employee. "I think it is important to have somebody who is readily accessible and available but at the same time it's a decision not to rush into," he says. "We are committed to finding the right person for that position."
Despite the company's internal shuffling and the criticisms from the Santa Fe business community, Al Lucero-owner of Maria's New Mexican Kitchen and chairman of the Occupancy Tax Advisory Board which approves advertisements for the CVB-says he's largely pleased with Maverick's efforts.
"Everybody is a critic," Lucero says. "Some people love the new ads and some people don't. I really had no problem with Impressions [Advertising] but Maverick gave us a new twist on what we were trying to accomplish…if Maverick doesn't maintain an office in Santa Fe that could cause some resentment, but otherwise we should have no major problems with them handling the advertising."
For another year at least. But when the bidding war for the new contract begins this winter, Carroll says he and other members of the hospitality and tourism industry are eager to take a more proactive role in promoting all that Santa Fe has to offer. Though he acknowledges it's a ride business owners can't take alone.
"We are definitely interested in taking the bull by the horns to create change for ourselves rather than relying on somebody who clearly has no interest whether we live or die," Carroll says. "[But] the marketing power rests with the City. We don't have the resources to do it ourselves completely. To create real effective and lasting change the City has to be involved."
