Grand image on the Strip

Grace Leong

Wednesday, Aug. 18, 1999 | 10:43 a.m.

Size matters.

And this summer, fans of pop superstar Cher will be treated to the biggest window billboard ever built in Las Vegas to commemorate her comeback to the concert stage.

Standing 190 feet tall and 130 feet wide, the psychedelic see-through window graphic lambasted on a western face of the MGM Grand hotel-casino features the singer-actress juggling three crystal balls. The graphic is the largest ever produced by Las Vegas-based Adera Corp.

As part of her 1999 tour, Cher will perform at the MGM Grand on Aug. 27 and 28, and the concert, sponsored by HBO, MGM Grand and Bill Graham Presents, will be broadcast nationwide live on HBO on Aug. 29.

The large-format digital printing company's portfolio includes creating similar blow-ups in Hollywood of NBC's late night talk-show hosts Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien, as well as a 12-story mural of "Babe, Pig in the City," and "Ed-TV" on the Fries Entertainment building on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles.

Window graphics are the newest advertising medium used to promote products and services, movies, radio stations, sports teams and rock stars. They have become popular fixtures on several Citizens Area Transit buses in Las Vegas.

Adera owns a 50,000-square-foot facility at 4545 W. Diablo Drive in Las Vegas that houses five 16-foot Vutek 1630 large-format inkjet machines that print images created by computer. It also prints window graphics, billboards and banners for Las Vegas casinos and car dealerships, trade shows and conventions worldwide. Some 25,000 square feet of vinyl film was used to create the 20-story graphic of Cher, comprised of 290 panels. Each panel is 20 feet long and 54 inches wide and had to be pieced together like a giant jigsaw puzzle.

"The window vinyl is like a big piece of Swiss cheese," said Dennis Mika, Adera's president. "It has to be laid out in sections because it came in different lengths and it has a pattern of holes in it. The ink prints between the holes. People from the outside can see the image but those on the inside of the building will just see the holes in the tint.

"The greatest challenge was laying it on the floor to inspect, label and check for quality," Mika said. "We had to number each section so the installers would know which section to put up there. If a section was put up incorrectly, we would have to peel it off and that stretches the vinyl, and the whole section would have to be made again."

He said the graphic, visible from the Orleans hotel-casino about two miles away, was installed in five days by two Los Angeles companies, Mikhom and Hangtime Installers.

While HBO and MGM graphic builders declined to reveal the cost of the project, Adera's director of sales and marketing, Doug Newson, suggested it could run up to "tens of thousands of dollars."

"It costs between $1,500 and $3,000 a month to rent a normal billboard around town, depending on its location, size of structure and traffic that goes by it," Newson said. "Better locations will have more impact and therefore cost more. And for the size of the Cher project, we're looking at about 30 billboards."

Following the gigantic creation, Adera is in discussions with a number of Strip hotels which are planning similar flamboyant window graphics for famous entertainers for millennium celebrations in Las Vegas, Newson said. He declined to reveal their names.

"We've received a couple of dozen calls after the Cher graphic came up and a number of big-name entertainers that are keen to do something similar for the millennium concerts are now in the planning stages for this," he said.

While the Cher window graphic may be the largest ever created in Las Vegas to date, this city is no stranger to flamboyant media advertising. Skytag Inc. of Los Angeles, which designed the Cher mural and subcontracted its production to Adera, made the Luxor look as if meteors had blasted through the hotel-casino for the promotion of the disaster movie "Armageddon" last September.

"It was all done with Clear Focus' printed vinyl, just like the Cher graphic," said Allison Weathers, Skytag's production manager. "Skytag would do the digital processing and getting the mural to scale and coordinate coloring."

The company, which installs and creates large-format murals, includes the Walt Disney Co. and Universal Studios among its clients.

Clear Focus Imaging Inc. of Santa Rosa, Calif., which produces perforated window-graphics vinyl film for marketing campaigns and product promotions, counts among its clients Coca-Cola, Pepsi Cola, McDonald's, Del Monte, AT&T, MasterCard, IBM and Visa.