Slogan's run

Jeff Candido and the five words that revitalized Las Vegas

By Newt Briggs

Okay, so 28-year-old advertising copywriter Jeff Candido doesn't deserve all the credit for revitalizing the Las Vegas economy. After all, he did work with a partner, 26-year-old Jason Hoff, who has since absconded for greener advertising pastures in New York City. And in the wings, there were all kinds of kibitzers and collaborators--capable minds who knew that alternatives like "Keep it between us," "You know how it goes" and "Get in on the secret" just didn't adequately convey the hypnotic allure of Las Vegas. But who would have ever guessed that five words (only one multisyllabic) could be so compelling--or so controversial?

Certainly not Candido, who was out with friends on the night that Ben Affleck nicked his line for a series of sketches on "Saturday Night Live" and who was sitting at home with his wife when Billy Crystal riffed on it at this year's Academy Awards. To think, it was only about 18 months earlier that Candido and Hoff retired to separate cubicles to kick around ideas for a retooled Las Vegas advertising campaign. According to what Candido dubs "the official story," the pair reconvened at the end of the day with the tagline that has helped boost Vegas back to pre-9/11 profits and to the forefront of international tourist destinations: "What happens here, stays here."

The seemingly unassuming phrase quickly became the bedrock for a series of television commercials that have since evolved into pop culture landmarks. For anyone who has worshipped at the incandescent altar during the last year, at least a few should be familiar: the middle-aged conventioneer who kisses her new--apparently foreign--husband outside a wedding chapel, the naughty Asian spinster who edits a postcard while sitting by the pool and the randy businesswoman who flirts with her limo driver on the way to the airport. Exactly what the ads are supposed to mean is left to the viewer's interpretation, but the message--expressed in white letters against a black background--is clear.

"We weren't even really trying to come up with a slogan," says Candido, a Vanderbilt alumnus and graduate of American marketing mecca the Creative Circus. "Usually, you come up with a strategy, then a campaign idea, then maybe some execution ideas and then a tagline will typically come out of that." Instead, Candido and Hoff fabricated a catchphrase that would re-imagine an entire city--an amazing achievement considering that neither of them had lived in Las Vegas for more than two years.

"I think it helped because we were still seeing the city like tourists," Candido says. "When you get to know too much about a product, I think you start being too inside, and you can't really see it from the perspective of the people who you are trying to address."

The motto-man empire

"Television commercials that are informational are a complete waste," says Billy Vassiliadis, CEO and principal of R&R Partners, longtime marketing firm for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. "Television is meant to entertain, to intrigue and to drive hits to the website. Its purpose is to create a demand for a product, not the means to attain the product."

Sitting on a plush leather couch in a second-floor office filled with political and sports memorabilia, Vassiliadis says it like he's still getting used to how it sounds. For the past 20 years, he's been trying to sell Vegas with stylized images of rolling dice, stacks of chips and beautiful people. He's signed off on countless panoramas of fountains and golf courses and even unearthed an unreleased song by a bygone Rat Packer.

Then Randy Snow, his trusted creative director, brought him this cockeyed plan for a series of "Vegas Stories"--Raymond Carver-esque vignettes that would expose the audience to the middle of a scene without giving any kind of background or explanation as to what was going on. Vassiliadis was not immediately bowled over.

"When Randy first presented the idea to me, I said, `Huh? Is that it?'"

But then Vassiliadis, also a political consultant and lobbyist, got to thinking about the virtues of advertorial ambiguity. "The challenge that we've always faced is how to represent Las Vegas to what is probably the most diverse visitor base of any travel destination," says Vassiliadis. "I mean, you know who goes to Orlando, you know who goes to New York. But here, we've had to struggle with how to advertise to young and old, the wealthy and the not-so-wealthy, middle America and urban America, male and female, white and black and everything in between. To put it simply, our constituency is every hotel and motel room in Las Vegas."

And for a time, R&R's constituency was in decline. While the local tourist economy never bottomed out, it did dip 2.7 percent during the first six months of 2002. At least in part, Vassiliadis chalked up this fluctuation to the spread of legalized gaming across the country, but he also recognized that it was time for Las Vegas to get a much-needed public makeover.

"Las Vegas being a family destination is absolutely terrible for us in terms of setting ourselves apart from the competition. We needed a campaign that would once again give adults a sense that they can create their own experience here." After a pause he adds, "within the bounds legality, of course."

The "Vegas Stories" campaign was an instant smash, working its way into everything from "Late Night with David Letterman" to "Frasier" to promos for "CSI." Personally, Vassiliadis knew it was working when he heard a stewardess use Candido's phrase on a flight from Chicago, but he knew it was a sensation when former Education Secretary William Bennett quipped the slogan on Tim Russert's "Meet the Press." Videotaped sitting at a Vegas slot machine, Bennett lamented, "Apparently, `What happens here, stays here' applies to everyone but me.'"

Says Vassiliadis: "When we had right-wing, ultra-conservative Bill Bennett saying the line, we knew we'd hit a home run."

It's about nothing

According to marketing guru Charles Whittier's Creative Advertising, "A slogan should be a statement of such merit about a product that it is worthy of continuous repetition in advertising, is worthwhile for the public to remember, and is phrased in such a way that the public is likely to remember it." It's sound advice--the kind of thing every first-year advertising student is made to learn as a mantra--but as Snow observes, influential campaigns generally diverge from the established paradigm.

"Good, effective advertising almost always breaks the mold," he says, citing Budweiser's "Whassup" and the singing Quizno's sponge monkeys as examples. He further notes that destination advertising is usually handcuffed by the need to sell the location to potential tourists.

"There's a certain expectation that travel ads are going to have lots of pretty shots of water and beaches and golf courses and smiling couples on horseback at sunset," Snow says. "But we came to the conclusion that we didn't have to do that anymore. Almost everyone knows what Las Vegas looks like, but fewer know how it really feels."

As a result, the "Vegas Stories" campaign was set in diners, parking lots and hotel lobbies--not necessarily the most grandiose of Strip locations. More than anything, the ads trade on imagination, not readymade commercial imagery. In a sense, they embrace the logic of "Seinfeld," telling stories about nothing--or nothing of consequence, anyway.

"Just look at the ads," says Vassiliadis. "We don't have people sunbathing, we don't have gambling, we don't have fancy restaurants, we don't have showgirls, we don't really even have any of the properties."

Rather, the spots drop in on day-in-the-life moments of everyday Las Vegas visitors. With an almost literary sensibility, they immerse the viewer in situations that seem both outlandish and strangely familiar. In a new commercial titled "Silent Car," four African-American women are riding to an unknown destination in the back of a limousine. One sits awkwardly toward the front, clearly ruminating over some sort of social blunder. After a few moments, one of the women starts to giggle, and although no one speaks, the laughter sweeps through the car. The commercial closes with a dark screen and Candido's now-famous tagline. It is a striking reminder that some of America's finest wordsmiths--F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Marquand, among them--cut their teeth as advertising copywriters.

"I never thought of it this way before, but someone recently told me that the ads rely on the Hitchcock strategy," Candido says. "The Hitchcock movies were so scary because he didn't show the murder. He didn't show the real violent stuff or the gore, but you imagined it in your head 10 times worse than he could ever show on film. And that's kind of what we did with the ads."

But according to Snow, it was the slogan that sealed the deal. "The `What happens here, stays here' line kind of helped close the circle conceptually. People saw that line and they went, `Ohhh, now I get it.' It made the situations real for them."

Tale of the tape

Although the media hubbub might indicate otherwise, R&R Partners' Las Vegas advertising campaign is, in a national sense, just small potatoes. To date, Vassiliadis estimates the LVCVA has doled out $30 million for the campaign--a drop in the bucket when compared with the advertising budgets of top-tier corporations.

"Budweiser probably spent as much on Super Bowl Sunday as we'll spend this year," Snow says.

Still, for a relatively small advertising campaign, "What happens here, stays here" has rankled its fair share of local pundits. For example, former Las Vegas mayor and current Harrah's executive Jan Jones has publicly criticized the implied message of the ads, and Las Vegas Sun columnist Jeff German--who seems to have an ax to grind with Vassiliadis--has recently blamed the "Vegas Stories" for everything from the appearance of the Ohio sniper in Las Vegas to the 55-hour Britney Spears wedding. R&R Partners has also come under fire from religious groups and the Nevada PTA, both of whom object to the suggestive nature of the ads.

"Every time I go out of the state, I hear at least a few negative comments from my colleagues," says D.J. Stutz, president of the Nevada PTA. "Maybe it's just the people that I spend time around, but the reality is that I've had PTA representatives from other states come up to me and say, `What's the deal with this advertising?' They see it as threatening not only to our community but to theirs as well."

Vassiliadis is predictably diplomatic about the issue. "This city is in a major transition, and as a result, we suffer from a pretty significant dual-personality disorder. On the one hand, we all intellectually understand that our taxes are low and we have great restaurants and entertainment because of the tourism economy. But on the other hand, there's a whole generation of Las Vegans that want to feel like they live in a real city. So there's that part of us that's understandably crying for legitimacy and wants to be recognized as a healthy community with good schools and parks and Little League and Scouts."

Candido is more blunt. "I think it's hilarious because anyone who sees anything salacious or sexy or perverted in any of these ads is only seeing it in their own heads. That's what makes me laugh whenever people talk about how scandalous they are. It's like, `You know what? You're the perv that's making them scandalous.'"

Ultimately, both men are willing to let the numbers speak for themselves. According to statistics from the LVCVA, Las Vegas had a record-breaking January this year, with more than 3 million visitors. Gaming on the Strip was up 12 percent from last year, and the average daily room rate--an industry barometer of hotel profitability--was up to $98 (a 15.5 percent increase over January 2003). Also, McCarran International Airport became the first American airport to return to pre-9/11 airline traffic rates.

And as for Candido--the supposed architect of this tourist renaissance--he continues to while away the days in the same cubicle that saw the spawning of the original concept. Despite his accomplishments, he's still just a lowly scrivener in the R&R hierarchy--albeit one with a beefed-up resume and a little extra cash in his pocket.

"I don't get a cut of the profits, but I've definitely been well taken care of," he says, careful to pay tribute to the advertising gods. "I mean, I'm not driving a Porsche or anything, but they've done me well since this took off."