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Matthew Burns:
Okay. Steve, I have a question for you. Imagine if you will a really super busy street full of vacationers and partiers and gamblers and smokers and sexy women and barely covering the bits, clothing, restaurants, strip clubs. What do you think of?

Stephen Semple:
Well, let me word it to you differently. What happens in stays in…

Matthew Burns:
Right? So when you hear that, okay, by the way, great ad campaign when they did that, phenomenal. Everybody knows it. Everybody thinks that. Everybody believes it. And I don’t know who you are in the world. If you’ve ever heard of Vegas, you believe that, you’re like, oh yeah, whatever happens there, because there’s some debauchery that’s happening in Vegas.

Stephen Semple:
And the interesting thing, just as a sidebar, that’s never actually been their official slogan, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. It’s “What happens here stays here.” “What happens here only happens here.” is a couple of variations of it, which is cool.

Matthew Burns:
Which is cool, but it goes to show that the consumer makes up what the brand is.

Stephen Semple:
Yes.

Matthew Burns:
Because the brand lives in the mind of the consumer. You say this all the time that I love, and I’ve now reiterated. So lemme ask you a question. This is the question I really want to ask you. So you imagine all these debauchery-type things, and we know they happen in Vegas because I mean, we were just there last year. We’re going to be in there again soon. H

ave you ever wanted to take your five-year-old and 12-year-old? Yeah, not really. If you’ve ever gone to Fairmont Street, you’re just not taking them there. So you said, and I was shocked. I actually don’t remember this at all, that they tried to sell Vegas as family-friendly. Talk to me about that.

Stephen Semple:
They did. So first of all, let’s go back to the early days of Vegas. The early days of Vegas were Rat Pack showgirls, right? Early Vegas was that’s how it was presented.

Matthew Burns:
Gangsters.

Stephen Semple:
Rat Pack, showgirls, gangsters, right?

Matthew Burns:
Yes.

Stephen Semple:
And then what ended up happening in the eighties and nineties, we started getting public money and things like that. And you started getting theme resorts, entertainment, diversification, and you started getting the Mirage and all these really, really big, glamorous resorts. And somewhere along the lines, basically in the 1990s, they said, you know what? Because we’ve got these resorts and there are all these events and all this other stuff, this would be a great place for kids.

So they actually launched a whole campaign towards family-friendly, and an MGM Grand Adventures was a theme park that was specifically built to serve families. It didn’t work. The Grand Adventures basically ran from 93 to 2000, all American Sports Park, 97 to 2001 shut down and repurposed other things. And then in 2003, they pivoted back to what happens here, stays here.

Matthew Burns:
And this is what I was trying to say, that’s a great slogan because it lives in the mind of the consumer, right? Actually, it’s a great way to think about Vegas. People are already thinking that about Vegas because everybody has made a mistake in Vegas. I’m not giving up secrets here about myself. But the idea here is that that’s the truth. They’re going again. What they did was start going against the brain of the consumer. What happened? There’s got to have been a downside.

Stephen Semple:
So the 1940s and fifties were kind of the whole glamor thing. In the sixties and seventies, they really leaned into it being the entertainment capital of the world. They did that type of advertising,

Entertainment Capital of the world. In the seventies and eighties, they got talking about it being an adult playground. And then the 90s and then the nineties were family-friendly. And then they pivoted back to what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. And now they’ve actually gone back even to an older slogan. So now they’re welcome to fabulous Las Vegas, which is actually a 1940s slogan that they’re bringing back, which is kind of cool.

Matthew Burns:
But I think that one will work.

Stephen Semple:
Sure. Because it fits all those themes. Now, why they do it, I don’t know. It’s always crazy to wonder about these things, and it’s the whole classic… Sometimes, what happens is you look at it and go on the surface. Look, if you wrote down all the things you could do in Walt Disney World and you wrote down all the things you could do in Vegas, you could actually draw some pretty good parallels.

Matthew Burns:
Yeah, sure you could.

Stephen Semple:
And you could sit there and go, could a kid have fun in Vegas? Absolutely. Oh my God, we don’t have families coming to Vegas. Let’s appeal to families. Let’s attract this new group we don’t have. Now here was the problem. First of all, they didn’t end up attracting more families. They really didn’t. Marginally more. But they did not attract more families. And gambling revenues went down.

Matthew Burns:
Because I don’t want to go hang out with my buddies for a bachelor party and then look like an idiot walking down the street bumping into kids. I don’t.

Stephen Semple:
It’s one of those things where the brand promise of Vegas is adult entertainment.

Matthew Burns:
Yes.

Stephen Semple:
That’s the brand promise. And if you did want to change that, if you said, “Look, we’re going to have to change this.” That’s a 30-year commitment; that’s a long time. You’re going to have to really work hard at it. And the thing is, the new people are going to be slow to gain the existing people; you’re going to lose almost immediately, which is essentially what they experienced.

And we don’t know, I wasn’t able to find anything that talked about why they did this pivot. Probably they’re so embarrassed that some gangsters took them out back and shot them and buried them.

Matthew Burns:
There were some cement shoes worn somewhere.

Stephen Semple:
But I’m going to guess it’s from looking at it from an intellectual, technical standpoint, this should be great for kids. And I know people who take their kids there, and they probably looked around and said, “Oh, there are people bringing their kids here. We should advertise for that.” But it broke the allure of Vegas.

Matthew Burns:
Well, and it’s so interesting to me because one of those things where if they hadn’t built a theme park there and advertised the theme park, but didn’t try to talk about Vegas as being family friendly, but just built a theme park, I think it would’ve worked better for them. And they just had that thing there, like that family-friendly resort, but only advertise the resort as opposed to advertising Vegas is now family-friendly. It would’ve worked better for them. You’re not advertising Vegas, you’re advertising the resort.

Stephen Semple:
Right. I had not thought about it. I had not thought about it that way. It was just one of those things.

Matthew Burns:
Wait a second. You did, I’m going to argue. No, **** you. [Laughter] Cut that out, Dylan. I did not say, you know what? Don’t cut it out. Bleep it out, but let it stay there. No, you know what? I argue that you brought this topic up to me, and I’m going to argue. No, because you said that we talked about what they’re doing now to bring people non-gambling revenue. They brought in a hockey team…

Stephen Semple:
What they have done is they’ve diversified away from gambling revenue. Gambling revenue as a percentage of Vegas is down, no question. Now, one could argue that online gambling and a bunch of other things are impacting that as well. But yes, they’ve diversified away. They’ve got F1, they’ve got the hockey team, they’ve got the Blue Man Group.

Matthew Burns:
They have a football team there.

Stephen Semple:
I don’t gamble at all. I don’t even do the five bucks in the slot. I find gambling boring. I hate it. And I will go to Vegas because you know what, Cirque du Soleil, you go see Oh, an amazing fricking show. You go check out F1, which we did last year. That’s right. There is a ton of great… Like, you want to go and do a whole pile of shows, you go to New York and you do Broadway, or you go to Vegas and see all the other stuff.

Matthew Burns:
Right. But this is the stuff that you said to me, and I’m just saying if they had, just because they don’t talk about F1 as being a Vegas thing. It’s F1. It’s awesome. Come watch F1. We just happen to be in Vegas. Hey, listen, come check out the Knights. The Golden Knights are fantastic. What a great hockey team. We’ve got a good facility. Boom. They’re selling themselves, and it’s bringing people to Vegas.

So if they had just said, listen, you want to bring more people to Vegas, if you build it, they will come. There’s that philosophy. If you put something there and it’s awesome and it’s remarkable, people will show up. That’s my belief.

Stephen Semple:
And even when they pivoted away from the family-friendly stuff, even their first tagline was not great. Their first tagline was, There’s more to do in Vegas than gamble. The entertainment capital of the world is better. And what happens here stays here is even better.

Matthew Burns:
Dude. And here’s the thing: telling people how to feel versus allowing them to feel it. I mean, we talk about this all the time, make people feel something, right?

Stephen Semple:
Yes.

Matthew Burns:
And so there is a feeling of, oh, I can get away with stuff if I go to Vegas, right? What happens here stays here. I’m going to get away with this. Okay, this was fun, guys. And listen, we’re not picking on Vegas. We said we love Vegas and everything else.

But if you want to create a story that’s sticky, if you really, truly want to make sure that it fits with the real marketing strategy, then know what the marketing strategy is that’s gotten people there first.

Stephen Semple:
Right? Choose who you’re going to lose. So let’s compare Disney in Vegas. So Disney chooses to lose adult entertainment. Yes, there’s adult entertainment, but not… Like basically Disney, it’s all you go to a Disney theme park. It is all family-friendly, all of it.

Matthew Burns:
Can I add to that, too? But what it is is that you’re a kid at heart.

Stephen Semple:
Right? You’re a kid at heart. So Disney has chosen what to lose. Vegas is now choosing what to lose. And that is family-friendly.

Matthew Burns:
That’s right. They’re there now.

Stephen Semple:
They’re there now. Or they were there and they got away from it and they’ve come back to it. Exactly. But the point is they’re both super successful.

Matthew Burns:
Yes.

Stephen Semple:
And look, here’s the crazy thing. I’ve gone to Vegas, I’ve gone to Disney. I have even gone to Vegas, and the years I’ve gone to Disney. Right? It’s not like they lost me as a consumer. No, they both serve two different things.

Matthew Burns:
Exactly. And you can’t be all things to everybody, guys.

Stephen Semple:
Correct.

Matthew Burns:
You cannot be all things to everybody.

Stephen Semple:
As soon as you do that, that’s when you lose.

Matthew Burns:
You lose. Unfortunately, you even lose both sides. And that’s what happened in Vegas. You lose both sides. Okay. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it, guys. I show this out. Stephen’s written another book, and you should know about it: 5 Silver Bullets. He wrote it with his partner, Gary Bernier. I’ll put a link to that in the comments. Thank you for constantly putting content into the world to help marketing get better and help businesses be better. You’re brilliant and I love you for it.

Stephen Semple:
Thanks, man. Thanks for the plug with the book. I appreciate that.

Matthew Burns:
Not a problem, guys. We’ll be back in a week.

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