Friday, April 22, 2005 | 10:47 a.m.
Former NFL running back Ricky Williams, whose sudden retirement in July in the midst of a multimillion-dollar contract sent the Miami Dolphins into an irreversible tailspin in the 2004 football season, was nearly hired to pitch Las Vegas in a "What happens here, stays here" television ad.
Randy Snow, one of the creative leaders of R&R Partners' wildly successful ad campaign, related the story in an appearance at a Las Vegas Advertising Federation lunch on Thursday.
"Ricky had agreed to do it and we had it set up with his agent," Snow said.
Snow said the script for the ad, part of a series of provocative and humorous television spots designed to encourage travel to Las Vegas by hinting and winking at the naughty side of tourist behavior, would have featured Williams addressing a press conference at which journalists are peppering him with questions about his disappearance from the league.
One of the prominent questions related to what he had been doing with his time away, and the ad would have ended with the "what happens here, stays here" tag.
Snow explained that the concept was developed after the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority was invited by Fox Network affiliates to purchase spots on a market-by-market basis during the 2005 Super Bowl broadcast.
But when the concept was explained to Fox officials, they feared reprisals from the NFL, which has attempted to ban Las Vegas from airing its ads during the league's championship game.
Instead, R&R offered an ad titled "Punch Drunk," another sports-themed placement in which a battered boxer is asked by his trainer whether he remembers where he is or what he did the previous night. When the boxer says no, the trainer grins and declares, "He's all right."
Fox officials gave that ad the green light and it ran in seven markets during the game.
In his presentation Thursday, Snow described the stormy relationship Las Vegas has had with the NFL.
It started in 2002 when R&R began gearing up an ad campaign, planning a debut at the 2003 Super Bowl game. Although ABC -- the television network that broadcast the game that year -- approved the ads, the NFL said any spot having to do with Las Vegas would be banned because the league feared that any reference to gambling would tarnish the reputation of the game.
The ad ban backfired on the NFL as commentators from coast to coast weighed in on the ads no one would see. Mayor Oscar Goodman, a member of the LVCVA board of directors, was a frequent guest on national talk shows and every program that ran the story showed the ads -- for free. R&R estimated that Las Vegas had received about $6 million to $8 million in free publicity as a result of the feud.
"What happens here, stays here," became a national phenomenon with late-night talk show host Jay Leno made repeated jokes using the tag as a punch line. Several television dramas and sitcoms borrowed the line in some fashion, Billy Crystal used it during the Oscar telecast and even the Wheel of Fortune game show used the slogan as one of its puzzles. R&R now simply refers to it as "WHHSH."
For the 2004 Super Bowl, Las Vegas went to the NFL again, Snow said, and once again the city was rejected. R&R responded by going to individual affiliates of CBS, the network that broadcast that year's game. Despite NFL warnings, the ad played on a local basis in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco and Dallas, five key Las Vegas feeder markets.
R&R departed from the WHHSH concept with an ad proclaiming that it would be more exciting and fun in Las Vegas than in the Super Bowl's host city of Houston.
But the NFL fired its own salvo in the battle. The league cracked down on local resorts, saying they could not charge an admission fee to their traditional Super Bowl parties, placing a limit on the screen size that could be used for showing the game and even forbidding businesses from using the words "Super Bowl" in their own promotional materials.
The post-game gnashing of teeth over the brouhaha was overshadowed by Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction controversy, and the issue quietly died.
For the 2005 game, R&R wasn't even going to go to Fox with the ads. But prior to the game, individual Fox affiliates approached the agency and R&R responded with the Ricky Williams proposal and, eventually, the "Punch Drunk" ad.
Snow said he isn't sure how long the WHHSH ads will remain popular.
"We've had experts tell us that if we don't get 10 years out of this, something's wrong," Snow said.
R&R and its team have developed 14 WHHSH ads. Snow said his challenge now is to keep the concept fresh.
"I guess the good news for us is that it hasn't lost any steam yet," he said.
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