Columnist Jeff German: Are Vegas Stories too scary?

Friday, March 14, 2003 | 11:14 a.m.

When you're marketing Las Vegas, it's basically impossible not to produce good results because Las Vegas markets itself.

Americans know exactly what Las Vegas is -- a town where dreams can come true, where you can find adventure, where you can do things you wouldn't dare do at home and where you can escape the realities of life, if only for a weekend.

This only-in-Vegas concept is behind the city's latest national advertising push that was kicked off in January with much hoopla.

The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority is spending $17 million in room tax money through May on its reality-based Vegas Stories campaign to remind Americans what they already know about the city.

And now the critics -- and maybe Las Vegans should too -- are starting to question whether those millions are being wasted.

Bob Garfield, the most influential advertising critic in the country, suggested on ABC's Good Morning America last week that the edgy Las Vegas ads, which are a radical departure from the traditional glitz we've come to expect, actually may be scaring tourists away.

It may be only one opinion, but it's a scary one, considering the amount of money being spent on this campaign.

One LVCVA television commercial aired around the country features a group of Shriners in a Strip coffee shop worried about one of their buddies the morning after a night of debauchery.

"We got one guy missing in action," one of the Shriners says. "All we got is a set of dentures. What are we going to tell his wife?"

In a review for Advertising Age, the marketing industry's biggest trade magazine, Garfield wrote that the "chance to vanish into thin air is not a come-on," but rather "an invitation to stay home.

"Did this guy run off with a floozy, or is he on next week's CSI as the cadaver?" Garfield asked.

R & R Partners President Billy Vassiliadis, who's been producing ads for the LVCVA for two decades, isn't letting one high-powered critic back him away from the campaign.

It has been a long time since R & R Partners did something for the LVCVA that generated this kind of buzz.

"I love these spots," Vassiliadis said. "I'm committed to these spots."

Vassiliadis is so committed that he's preparing to spend millions more of the LVCVA's money on a new round of Vegas Stories expected to air in the fall.

Though Vassiliadis is fond of saying he took a big risk with this campaign, in reality he took no risk at all.

Even if LVCVA research eventually confirms Garfield's suspicions, it won't be a marketing catastrophe.

Americans will keep coming because they don't need Vassiliadis to tell them what they already know about Sin City.

And it probably won't stop the LVCVA from giving Vassiliadis still more millions to come up with a new campaign to market a town that markets itself.

Only in Las Vegas.