Columnist Susan Snyder: Ad wizards did not stay here

Friday, Oct. 22, 2004 | 4:36 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursday and Sundays. Reach her at snyder@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4082.

WEEKEND EDITION

October 23 - 24, 2004

Las Vegas' award-winning tourism slogan stayed here, but the guys who wrote it have moved away.

Advertising writer Jeff Candido and Jason Hoff were working at R & R Partners in Las Vegas when they coined the "What happens here, stays here" slogan in 2002.

But two years later Candido works for Arnold Worldwide, a Boston advertising agency responsible for the popular Volkswagen campaigns. And Hoff lives in New York and works for BBDO, which has clients that include Pepsi and Federal Express.

"It was a big thing and great opportunity early on," the 28-year-old Candido said in a telephone conversation Thursday. "People are lucky to be associated with something like that once."

The phrase is the hallmark of the "Las Vegas Stories" campaign, which shows people in the planning or aftermath of their personal Las Vegas adventures: A group of young women laughing in a limousine; a woman scratching out sections of a postcard home; a man trying to have his hotel wake-up call sent to his cell phone.

"We wanted to tell some personal stories of people in Vegas. But the stories we would come up with you could never show on network television," Candido said. "It just dawned on us that people don't tell those stories anyway."

Candido and Hoff often discussed the concept but mostly worked separately.

They compared notes at the end of one work day. "And to our surprise, we both had the line written, almost exactly as it is today," Hoff wrote in an e-mail from his New York office.

Randy Snow, R & R's executive creative director, said the line is a takeoff on a decades-old traveling salesmen's saying: "What happens on the road, stays on the road."

But the Las Vegas twist has made the line one of the most-copied in the industry. Billy Crystal closed the Oscar telecast with a variation. Even "Saturday Night Live" did a skit spoofing it.

Locally, the phrase has spawned everything from knockoff T-shirts to a Meadow Gold diary billboard that says, "What's made in Vegas, stays in Vegas."

R & R has a "cease-and-desist list" of those who have been asked to stop using the trademark phrase.

"But if they're stealing from us, they're not stealing from Ford or McDonald's," Snow said. "I can't see how that's bad for us."

Snow also said the slogan might not make Las Vegas look as dumb as locals assume it does. Firms from all over the world have contacted R & R since the campaign emerged.

"And they are surprised to hear we are based in Las Vegas," Snow said. "The idea of someone doing something that creative and good (in Las Vegas) is just foreign to people."

Not to all. Candido and Hoff readily admit that the slogan provided a pretty solid launching pad for their careers.

Snow agreed.

"You can make a career out of one slogan," he said.

Neither Candido nor Hoff is 30 yet, so both hope they still have a few sparkling turns of phrase in their futures. Still, they are amazed at the impact of what was a relatively low-key national campaign.

"The most flattering for me was some advertising trade magazine comparing it to (Wendy's) 'Where's the beef?' from the '80s," Hoff said in his e-mail. "Could it possibly get any better than that?"