Vegas, gambling images go mainstream in ads

14.11.2003, Lesen Sie hier den Bericht über «Vegas, gambling images go mainstream in ads».

Decades after Elvis Presley warbled "Viva Las Vegas," marketers, agencies and media companies are lustily joining the chorus, flooding the commercial culture with images of gambling and Las Vegas to woo consumers.

The allure of slots, showgirls, roulette and raffish Rat Packers is being invoked by blue-chip companies like Delta Air Lines, DreamWorks, Ford Motor, the NBC division of General Electric, Levi Strauss, PepsiCo and Time Warner. They join brands that one might assume would be ardent fans of Las Vegas life styles like, well, the LifeStyles line of condoms sold by the Ansell Healthcare division of Pacific Dunlop.

Las Vegas and gambling were mainstays of marketing and the media in the 1950s and 1960s, including Budweiser commercials that featured Frank Sinatra; then again in the 1970s and 1980s, as seen by the ABC-TV series "Vegas."

The reasons for their return are almost as numerous as the confederates of Danny Ocean in the Rat Pack casino-heist film "Ocean's Eleven" (1960), remade in 2001 by the Warner Brothers division of Time Warner, which is soon to spawn a sequel, "Ocean's Twelve." "One trend we've seen emerge among consumers is an interest in small pleasures, something that's a little more exciting, like the thrill of the slots," said J. Walker Smith, the president of the research company Yankelovich Partners, who is based in Atlanta. "What's also interesting is that all this is being done in a very playful way," he added, "not emphasizing the dark elements of Las Vegas but rather the light, theme-park elements."

Helping that happen were intensive efforts by Las Vegas hotels and casinos, along with the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, to readjust the city's image to sell it as a more family- friendly vacation spot. While those efforts are now being supplanted with more adult-themed advertising -- most notably a campaign by R&R Advertising carrying the theme "What happens here, stays here" -- they seem to have, as Smith put it, "taken the edge off the 'Sin City' image," making Las Vegas and gambling imagery more palatable for mainstream marketers and media companies. So the new low-fare airline division of Delta, Song, is running print ads carrying the headline "Viva Las Savings." In September, NBC introduced an hourlong drama, "Las Vegas," to its Monday night prime-time schedule; the show, from NBC Studios and the DreamWorks Television unit of DreamWorks, has already been renewed for the full 2003-4 season.

Other examples include the commercial by the Ford division of Ford Motor for the subcompact Focus, by the Detroit office of J. Walter Thompson, part of the WPP Group, which centered on a wild road trip by a young office worker seeking to deliver a package to "L. Vegas." And the Dockers division of Levi Strauss brought out a spot presenting a rambunctious 24-hour bachelor party in Las Vegas as the ultimate torture test for a new line of stain-resistant slacks. "Dockers had been suffering a little bit as 'the business-casual uniform' and wasn't as exciting a brand as we wanted it to be," said Brian Bacino, senior vice president and group creative director at the Dockers agency, the San Francisco office of Foote, Cone & Belding, part of the FCB Group division of the Interpublic Group of Cos. "Las Vegas is an instant symbol for fun and fantasy and adventure," he added, "so it seemed perfect for the assignment."

The attempts to market Las Vegas as family friendly help "legitimize it and make it right for Dockers, a very mass and somewhat wholesome brand," Bacino said. "The kind of fun symbolized by Las Vegas has become a little more mainstream and accepted nowadays." Indeed, the filming of the spot, on location in Las Vegas, "was the most fun shoot I've ever been on, ever," he said, laughing.

Another reason for the trend is the increased presence of gambling in American cities outside Las Vegas. "The idea that gambling is more acceptable now, more of a mainstream activity, helped a lot" to inspire a plot with a gambling theme for a new PepsiCo commercial, said Al Merrin, vice chairman and executive creative director at BBDO Worldwide in New York, part of the Omnicom Group. The spot, for the new Lay's Staxsnack chips sold by the Frito-Lay division of PepsiCo, features the comedian Dana Carvey in dual roles as a gambling housewife and a casino dealer.

Another sign of the broadening interest in gambling is a magazine named Vegas, introduced in June as a joint venture of a company outside Las Vegas, SoBe News, based in Miami, and the Greenspun Media Group, whose headquarters are in the Las Vegas-area city of Henderson. Greenspun Media is a sister company of the Las Vegas Sun. Of the 80,000 copies of each issue of Vegas printed, 65 percent to 70 percent are distributed outside Las Vegas, in cities like Dallas, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Seattle. "All of a sudden, Vegas is a place where young, exciting people go to play hard," said Jerry Powers, the co-publisher of the magazine, with Michael T. Carr, and the president and chief executive of SoBe News. "And even if you're sitting in Des Moines and can't participate," he added, "you're living the dream."

What about those consumers who object to gambling and the Las Vegas life style on moral grounds? "They, more than anyone, buy our magazine," Powers said. "They have to study it."

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