Winning never comes easy in Las Vegas – not even for billion-dollar players like Wynn Las Vegas Resort and Country Club.

The summer months and the Christmas season slow tourism in the city considerably, leaving even many of Vegas’ most renowned hotel-casinos in dogfights for business. Rooms often go unoccupied. Retail outlets thirst for shoppers. Even the gaming tables see action decrease.

To combat these seasonal slumps – and to compete with other gaming houses – Wynn Las Vegas executives have developed a marketing campaign that combines direct and digital channels in a way that they hope will distinguish the upstart hotel from competitors.

At the heart of the campaign are glossy foldout booklets and video-enhanced CD-ROMs that tout the hotel’s numerous luxury and entertainment features. Slick, shiny and packed with lush images, the Wynn mailer looks and feels like a costly extension of the resort’s sumptuous offerings.

Tens of thousands of would-be guests have perused the disks’ content. Lance Evans, the executive director of hotel sales and marketing, says that even though the information in the mailer is available on the resort’s Web site, the disks have become a hugely popular way of mining information about Wynn Las Vegas – largely because the mailer puts something tangible in viewers’ hands.

“There’s a perceived value in receiving a disk in the mail, as opposed to the offer simply being stated in a letter,” explains Evans. “Everyone goes to the disk.”

Each CD is put together like a digital catalog and walks users through a tour of the 215-acre resort, showcasing its broad range of high-end amenities. The disks also often extend special-offer bookings and allow users who are online to click through to book rooms on the hotel’s Web site.

But the campaign’s value extends beyond even room occupancy. The direct effort also gives the $2.7-billion casino resort a prime opportunity to help distinguish itself from the myriad other casinos and hotels that dominate the Las Vegas landscape.

And, of course, more visitors to the hotel usually means more revenue for the shops and restaurants also located inside Wynn Las Vegas, which features an 111,000-square-foot casino, 22 food and beverage outlets, an on-site 18-hole golf course, a sports-car dealership and approximately 76,000 square feet of retail space.

The resort, which opened in 2005, has dropped the CD mailer five times so far: twice in 2005, two times last summer and once in December, Evans says. The offers have varied, and the drops have gotten larger. Wynn also partnered with a major air carrier for two of the drops, with the resort supplying the mail pieces and the air carrier providing a select list of customers to receive the disk.

Since the CD drives users to the Web Site, the company is able to use cookies to track who their customers are, since each computer has a unique IP (Internet Protocol) address, Evans says. There has been a “viral” effect in each of the campaigns, with many of the disks being passed from the original recipient on to friends and family, he adds.

With regard to the CD mailer, Evans says, the hotel measures ROI by nights a customer spends in a room, room revenue, gaming activity and the use of its entertainment and recreational facilities.

Evans declines to detail the current number of drops, but says one of the 2006 summer drops involved 65,000 pieces; the other 205,000 pieces. Those resulted in the tracking of 164,000 unique IP addresses uploading and viewing the CD, he says.

The most recent drop, which included an offer of a complimentary room upgrade, sent the CD to previous customers whose names were obtained from a loyalty list of hotel guests, he says.

“We can actually track exactly who is utilizing the disk and then assess what areas of the Web Site they are clicking through to,” Evans says. “It’s great because we don’t have to rely on phone calls and tracking of calls to the (hotel’s toll-free) number to measure utilization.”

And Evans hopes more and more viewers will eventually go from the site to the suites: “There is a lot of competition in this city, especially during the slower periods. And the rooms don’t instantly book themselves without a little help.”