Columnist Jeff German: NFL snub is a score for LVCVA

Wednesday, Jan. 15, 2003 | 11:05 a.m.

The roar of anger is deafening. Tourism officials are up in arms, the mayor is threatening a lawsuit and the media is buzzing about the hypocrisy of the National Football League.

It's all because the stuffy suits at NFL headquarters in New York are refusing to let the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority run an edgy commercial promoting the city during the Super Bowl, the year's most-watched television event.

The NFL doesn't mind the content of the commercial. It just doesn't like being associated with a gambling town on national television, even though some form of legalized gambling now is in 47 states.

Could tourism officials have come up with a better way to draw attention to their new $58 million marketing campaign? Probably not.

The stuffy suits at the NFL, it turns out, played right into the hands of the LVCVA and its advertising agency, R&R Partners, which unveiled the first of a series of televisions ads, dubbed "Vegas Stories," for the campaign at Tuesday's LVCVA board meeting. The ads suggest everyday fantasies can come true here.

All of the righteous indignation aimed at the NFL during the meeting actually was carefully orchestrated.

Tourism officials knew last month that the NFL had killed the 30-second spot planned for the Super Bowl. The ad, "Mistress of Disguise," features a woman dressed in a sexy outfit hopping into a limousine and jumping out at the airport in a business suit.

The LVCVA's brain trust planned to hype the controversy with the NFL to gain the national media's interest in the marketing campaign, which R&R Partners boss Billy Vassiliadis said Tuesday is the most exciting one his firm has put together in years.

The story was given to Wall Street Journal reporter Christina Binkley as an "exclusive" at the expense of the local media, which isn't likely to forget the snub.

But Mayor Oscar Goodman, tabbed to serve as the LVCVA's chief NFL basher, let the story slip out during a Las Vegas radio interview on Monday. Soon word found its way to the rest of the local media, and by the time the story was published in Tuesday morning's Wall Street Journal, it wasn't much of an exclusive.

The controversy, however, remains and is likely to have legs with the Super Bowl still two weeks away, which gets us back to the stuffy suits at the NFL.

To say that the NFL is hypocritical would be an understatement.

Dozens of former NFL greats are planning visits to local sports books on Super Bowl Sunday to help celebrate one of the biggest betting weekends of the year.

And the NFL continues to promote fantasy football, one of the most popular ways to wager on professional sports, on its own website.

Should Las Vegans be angry over the NFL's hypocrisy? Sure.

Should we worry our hearts out over it? No.

This little brouhaha is going to bring a gold mine of publicity and, of course, more tourists, our way.