August 22 2008:      When I see a newspaper story that makes me grit my teeth, I can't hold back. I fire up my antique Mac and pound out a letter to the editor. Because I spent several years in the business as an editor, I'm particularly incensed when I see reporters jump on amateur athletes as if making a mistake now and then was cause for mockery. So when my favorite newspaper, the Rocky Mountain News, hectored our Olympic girl gymnasts for losing to China, here's the note I sent the sports editor: "Re Clay Latimer's piece on US female gymnasts in the Olympics ("US women get left at the falter") on Aug. 13. Pretty cute stuff, Clay. You really made a bunch of teenage kids look bad. "Rattled," you wrote. "Stumbling, bumbling, unraveled." A "meltdown" in which "several members wept." And "Flop house," what a neat headline. Any American who watched our girls lose to China was disappointed, but you seemed to take it personally. These are not "women" as the headline roared, but young girls who have trained for years, who have sacrificed to make themselves into champions, who have on some nights been the best in the world. But to you they were bums who couldn't get out of their own way. Pro athletes who make millions are fair game. But kids who have lived a dream, who have risen to the top of American sports, who have made all of us so proud of them and of our country, and who managed 'only' a silver medal, don't deserve to be ridiculed." P.S. The Rocky Mountain News printed the letter, together with several similar letters from outraged readers. Yes!

      August 11 2008:      Can you imagine an America without newspapers? And without magazines? Those who proclaimed it could never happen should think again. Some experts see newspapers "bottoming out" in another three or four years--and no one knows exactly how deep the bottom will be. And when the Audit Bureau of Circulation gave its mid-year report a few days ago, one magazine industry newsletter called the drop in revenue "unprecedented." But newspapers appear to be in far deeper trouble. The New York Times reports that ad sales are worst in California and Florida because problems in the housing market have killed real estate ads. The San Francisco Chronicle, according to Times reporter Richard Perez-Pena, is losing $1 million dollars a week. Newspaper ad revenue fell 8% last year. This year it's already 12% below that. One industry analyst says closures and bankruptcies are "inevitable." Advertising has been flowing to the Internet for more than a decade, says the Times, but the rush to digital picked up last year. Of course, some say the Net will help newspapers by pulling in more readers. Maybe, but I wouldn't bet on it. Get ready for a new society that gets its news via mobile phones--a society where only squares read newspapers and magazines.

      August 1 2008:      The news from China was disappointing before the Beijing Olympics even started. Can you believe the government struck dog meat from the menu? The official Olympic restaurants were told to "patiently suggest other options" if diners ordered "xiangrou," which is what they call Bowser over there. Say what? No dog meat? Next thing you know they'll put snails on the "Do Not Serve" list. I suppose calf brains, chocolate covered ants and those 100-year-old moldy eggs are out, too. Wouldn't you know it--everything I like. But on the hopeful side, all the factories have been closed. This means the lower grandstand fans can actually see the athletes. I think. I saw a photo on Drudge the other day and the bad air was still hanging around, looking for victims. But at least you can feel safe at the Games. I understand the Chinese army has moved three divisions into the city and will shoot on sight if you even think of carrying a Dali Lama sign. I'm really happy I gave my tickets away. I mean, the food and the air are lousy to start, but with dog now off the menu, just imagine what they'll throw in there to replace it.

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      July 22 2008:      Did you see the recent Associated Press story on viral advertising? The headline called it, "A new frontier in marketing." It's really kind of sick to learn that companies such as Anheuser-Busch spend their money on such raunchy and demeaning Web-TV "entertainment." Viral advertising started as word of mouth. Now you see it on such illustrious sites as YouTube. If you ever doubted that the current youth culture is headed for the bottom of the cesspool, one look at an Internet viral spot should convince you. One of them named "Swear Jar" features a series of words that would get any mainstream TV network closed in seconds. But the freedom of the Internet allows creative minds to break down all the barriers--and as the hearts of viewers harden, the spots become ever more scurrilous. As advertising, viral is impossible to track for effectiveness. Yet the AP story quotes a professor from St. Louis University as saying that viral ads "work" because consumers share them. Wise up, prof. When advertising "works," direct marketers know it for a fact because replies from ads go directly to them. Viral isn't advertising. It's nonsense.

      July 11 2008:      If you're a fan of text messaging, look for the strangest copy to show up on your phone when you get within 30 miles of your bank, your favorite clothing store, or your favorite auto parts store. The message will alert you to a sale, right now, today, this instant--provided you stop whatever you're doing and get down to the store right away. How'd they know I was so close to the bank before they sent the message, you might ask? According to DM News, where I saw the story, the list is available by geography. Therefore, a text blast can nail you if you're within 30 miles of the sponsor. And Infinite Media, of White Plains, NY, says that response rates from text messaging are "some of the best." Yes. my friend, with 25 million phone numbers and lifestyle data in their grasp, Infinite Media is about to give new meaning to the term "blast." I understand that 150,000 victims, I mean prospects, is the smallest buy you can make. The only way to escape is to turn off your phone. But who in today's society would ever do that? And besides, the sale might be terrific.

      July 1 2008:      Those of us who write direct mail do damn near anything to make sure our letters get opened. And usually we'll add "teaser" headlines that reveal the offer, a benefit, a promise or all three on the front side of the envelope. When the teaser hits the self-interest of the prospect or customer, the letters usually get opened. So when I picked up my mail the other day and saw a teaser that read, "Invoice Enclosed," I frowned. Then I noticed the piece came from "The Hearst Corporation Invoicing Bureau," and I frowned again. Maybe "scowled" would be a better word. Since I hadn't ordered anything from anyone, I opened the letter. Sure enough, an invoice--with a letter that read,, "Thank you for choosing to be part of our Continuous Service Program. As we recently notified you, your renewal to Popular Mechanics has been processed. Payment is now due. Please enclose your check with the invoice below." I've seen some misleading tricks to get a subscriber to renew, and this one is right in there. I didn't "choose" to be part of their "Continuous Service Program," a phony name if I ever heard one. They didn't "notify" me of anything. I never asked them to "process my renewal." Those are come-ons to make the subscriber feel guilty, and they'll probably work. But they're low class. And PM just lost me as a subscriber.

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      June 22 2008:      It's not your usual gaming conference. The people strolling around are all casino marketers--among the best in the business. You're invited to walk right up and ask them the marketing questions that have been rumbling around in your mind for weeks. You get such an opportunity only at Casino Marketing 2008, the National Conference, July 22-24 at Paris Las Vegas. The show opens on July 22, with a day-long session on Player Development. Then you're hit with some real heavyweights like Dr. Bill Eddington of the University of Nevada, the No. 1 authority on worldwide commercial gaming. Dave Zamarin, who pioneered gaming research. Steve Browne, Raving Consulting's top guy on motivating middle managers. Al Bernstein, the TV boxing analyst, tells you how to make sporting events pay off on the casino floor. Richard Schuetz, speaks in the Player Development session. The Lifetime Achievement Award goes to its first woman, Ginny Shanks, a pro for 25 years with Harrah's. And the laugh-out-loud side of the conference is Keynote Luncheon speaker Don McMillan. Then come the Romero Awards, named after your faithful reporter. And Dennis Conrad ends the show with his annual nail-biter, "The Best and Worst Casino Promotions of 2008." Sound good? Punch in www.casinomarketing2008.com right now for all the details. Or register by phoning Condor Registration at 256-852-4490.

      June 11 2008:      Remember when you'd walk to your mailbox and find a personal letter from a sweetheart, or from a family member? You simply couldn't wait to open it and read those delicious words that transported you back through time and brought you face-to-face with the writer. Glorious moments, many of them, just to see a loved-one's magic appear on the paper--line after line of serried handwriting. Sad moments, too, when you discovered a friend had gone west, as they used to say. They were more than letters. They were pieces of the writer's soul, dedicated only to you. They were heirlooms, keepsakes, treasures, works of art, masters of your memories. And if you were away from home or in a foreign land or at war in desolate and inhuman surroundings, they were doubly sweet. They announced love and life, misery and death, the birth of a child, stunning good fortune and crushing defeat. Remember them now, for their time has passed. They are obsolete, worn out, finished, losers to hasty writing and halfway thought. Email is the standard now and the experts say, "Keep it short." A recent study by Habeas shows 67 percent of consumers prefer Email for personal communication--and 65 percent prefer it for business. My Mac offers me the world--but it will never take the place of the personal letters I remember and revere.

      June 1 2008:      You have to admire Arnie Wexler. He never gives up. Day and night, seven days a week for all I know, the guy details the repugnant cost of compulsive gambling. And he should know. He's in the recovery stage now, and maybe for life. Meanwhile, Arnie know everyone in the casino business. Well, almost. And once you get on his mailing list you're on for life. The guy is a one-man company, doing everything he can to "out" compulsive gambling for the sickness it is. And casinos, of course, want him to succeed. In the year 2000, according to a recent story by John Canzano in the Oregonian, the security staff of the National Basketball Association asked for Arnie's help. He met with NBA officials for four hours, they told him they had a problem, and asked for his help. Arnie and his wife were running an intensive treatment program at the time. Sure, said Arnie., Three days later The NBA called him back. This time they wanted to set up meetings with coaches, officials and players from every team. It looked good, but nothing happened. Arnie thinks someone in the NBA hierarchy killed it. End of story? Maybe. But with the scandal of game official Tim Donaghy still fresh, you'd think the NBA might take a second look.

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      May 22 2008:      Unidentified flying objects, otherwise known as UFOs, have been seen in the skies above Texas since the beginning of the year. Hundreds have reported them, including a private pilot who has been flying for 30 years. Unfortunately, all of these persons are idiots, dopes, liars, or jokesters. They're unreliable, prone to fantasy, are easily confused by Venus and other bright planets and stars, and have read way too much science fiction. At least, that's the unspoken position taken by "science" and by practically all of the nation's press. I'll give the scientists a little break. Some of them have told me sotto voce that they believe UFOs are interplanetary spaceships but they're afraid their careers will end if they admit it. The press is another matter. They're the real idiots. The reporters sometimes start to interview witnesses by asking, "Do you drink?" TV anchors chuckle as they read the story, and wink a couple of times at the blondes on their right. In a courtroom, eye witness testimony can send a man to prison. In reports of UFOs, it counts for zip. I've studied and investigated UFO sightings for decades. I've seen them on three occasions. Nobody knows were they come from, but they're real. And they're here. Believe it.

      May 11 2008:      Maybe you saw the Associated Press story by Anick Jesdanun late last year, It revealed how computer viruses were started by a precocious ninth grader more than 25 years ago. Guy named Rich Skrenta wrote a self-replicating virus he named "Elk Cloner." He loosed something harmless (at the time) to trick his pals. Never mind why. Skrenta has cost all of us hundreds of dollars buying software that changes every year, the little twerp. But he's 40 now. Too late for a spanking. Besides, he became a computer genius and made millions, which is another reason to dislike the guy intensely. If it had stopped there, okay. But two brothers in Pakistan wrote "Brain," which didn't cause much damage and displayed a phone nu,mber to call for repairs. Nice of them. In 1988, "Morris" infected 6,000 computers, and in 1999 "Melissa" sent copies of itself to the first 50 names in your address book if you opened the attachment Then came "Love Bug," in 2000, :"Code Red" in 2001, "Blaster in 2003, and "Sasser" in 2004, each one more malicious than its predecessor. My advice? Get a Mac.

      May 1 2008:      Will a no-smoking law hurt the gambling business? That's what Colorado legislators asked last year--before they extended a statewide smoking ban to casinos. The answer is a 15 percent drop year-over-year in March, but it may not all be due to the new law. Of course, smokers and casino bosses filled the local prints with threats and doomsday predictions before legislators made their move, but there are no real arguments on the pro-smoking side. Even if it didn't affect the health of non-smokers, tobacco smoke is a damn nuisance. Okay, so much for objectivity. I hate the stuff. An executive of the Colorado Gaming Association said the group feels "pretty confident:" that most of the drop is the fault of the smoking ban--not the weather and not the economy. But a spokesman from Bronco Billy's in Cripple Creek says he feels it's really 60 percent no smoking, 20 percent weather and 20 percent economy. Meanwhile, the American Lung Association of Colorado says the air inside casinos has gone from "unhealthy" to "good." When I ws marketing director of the old Del Webb's Sahara in Las Vegas, I suggested the GM set aside a no-smoking section. He looked at me like I was the nut case. Times change, don't they.

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      April 22 2008:      Casinos are starting to look like old science fiction movies--the kind where robots and weird machines do everything and the humans walk around in out-of-style white coats and trousers trying to find out what their jobs are. Some joints never send cash vouchers. They just let the player know his money is in one of their cash machines--waiting for him to come in and draw it out. At other places you get your comps and drawing tickets from a kiosk. And ticket in-ticket out games are everywhere. The human side is gone. You can spend a hour on the slot floors of some places and never see a soul from the house. So when Dennis Conrad and Steve Browne of Raving Consulting Company in Reno, came up with a program named "Slot Ambassadors," I told them they should have named it "Rage Against the Machine." When I got a good look at it I stopped kidding. It's personal service all over again. "Slot Ambassadors" on the floor are like money in the bank. Raving has a 4-step program and a tactical manual so big you could hurt your back trying to lift it. I mean, these guys are thorough. They expect to get the program going in several casinos this summer--which means the human side is back. Get lost, Gort.

      April 11 2008:      The headline above the story by Sylvia Hubbard on Newsmax.com read, "Cell Phones More Dangerous Then Cigarettes." Do you know a single person who doesn't have a cell phone? of course you don't. How could humanity survive without cell phones? I mean, what would you do with your hands? How else could you take 30 calls a day--and make 45? And now they're worse than cigarettes? Got to be a mistake somewhere. Let me look at that story again. Hah! Here it is. The neurosurgeon who broke the news is an Australian. Those people live on the underside of the earth. The whole country stands on its head. What do they know about cell phones? And the doctor's name is Vini Khurana. Let me hear you say that real fast a couple of times. Okay. Going forward, as they say, we find that it's going to be another four years before we actually see how bad cell phones are. Dr. Khurana says by 2012, millions will have used cellphones for 10 years and he can check on the rise of brain tumors. But already he knows that tumors usually form on the "preferred ear." That leaves you with an out. Switch ears. You might get 10 more years of life that way. As for quitting cell phones--let me know if anyone you know actually does.

      April 1 2008:      USA Weekend is a feckless little preprint that slips in among the catalogues and real estate sections in a large number of Sunday newspapers. A headline on a recent edition caught my attention. "Stopping junk mail," it read. It wasn't exactly a revelation because newspapers routinely bust direct marketing over the head. They act like we purposely send mail just to make people mad. No direct marketer does that--but we do send to those whose profiles and buying histories indicate they may want our product. Newspapers never mention that they send mail, too. The New York Times is one of the worst offenders if you want to look at it that way--but I'd never call their mail junk. It's well-written, as is most prospecting mail. Yet it's always easy to find groups or individuals who hate almost everything that shows up in their mailboxes--so the tern "junk mail" has stuck. You never hear from the elderly, the shut-ins and the lonely because many of them like to get mail, no matter who sends it. Maybe you can tell that I'm trying to stay calm when only mail gets the "junk" treatment. I mean, I'm sick of junk newspapers, junk TV, junk Internet, junk billboards, junk telephone calls and junk radio? Have you ever felt that way?

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      March 22 2008:      My friend, The Amazing Kreskin, always writes predictions for the coming year. I've taken market positions based on this man--ever since the day in 1978 when he walked into my office at the Sahara Las Vegas, looked at my pregnant wife and said, "What are you going to name the boy?" Sure enough, three months later, a boy. A partial 2008 forecast from Amazing (which really is his first name): (1) the outcome of the presidential election will be decided within the last two weeks of the campaign (2) no major attacks on the US homeland between now and election day (3) the war on terror will last at least 30 more years (4) Michael Vick will play pro football again (5) the next crime trend will be home invasions. Not the cheeriest predictions I've ever heard him make, but there you are...This next story is one of the reason I love marketing people. Marc Kaplan. marketing director of the Taos Mountain Casino, Taos Pueblo, NM, reports that his casino has its own radio booth. They broadcast three live shows a week, too. Kaplan, also known as "Marketing Marc," writes the scripts for all of them. The shows take calls, and since KTAO streams 24/7 on the internet, maybe you can catch it. Hey, this Kaplan not only promotes the casino, he promotes the city, too. What a guy.

      March 11 2008:      I admired Denver University long before I moved to Colorado. I always thought of it as a no-nonsense school, where learning was paramount and everything else ranked well behind (for example, they dropped basketball when they had one of the best teams in the nation). So when my friend Gary Wright, boss of G.A. Wright Marketing, hooked up with DU's Daniels College of Business in a unique experiment, I knew it would be a winner. They call the project TIME--for Tribal Institute for Marketing Education. The brochure says it's a program that covers, "The full scope of casino marketing concepts from terminology and strategy to tactical execution, advertising and data analysis," The tribal students will get five intense three-day blocks of instruction for five months. DU professors from the business college and G.A. Wright experts teach the classes. Guest lecturers and casino industry pros fill in. (Full disclosure: I'm on the TIME board of directors.) Some of the lectures are held at nature settings in the Rocky Mountains. The classes are designed for native Americans, but are open to any student recommended by a casino or tribe. For information, 303-871-4565.

      March 1 2008:      I seldom write about politics, but political tactics interest me and Barack Obama's people have one that's a real beauty. After Super Tuesday, he was reported to have raised more then seven million bucks in a week--all from the Internet. Whoa, I said. Seven million from nickel and dime donors, and so fast? Must have a monster list, I thought. Then I read Brian Quinton's piece in the February issue of Direct magazine. When a December rally at Columbia, SC, drew 30,000, the crowd was asked to text their cell phone numbers to Obama headquarters and sign up for mobile messages. Then they were invited to look at tickets they were handed as they entered. Each had a name and phone number of four registered South Carolina Democrats. "Would they take 10 minutes right now to call these four people and urge them to vote for Obama in the South Carolina primary in January?"writes Quinton. Then, probably as astonished as I was when I read it, Quinton points out that Obama's campaign found a way to data-mine a live event and then got people to make up to 120,000 campaign calls--and charge the calls to their own bills. Because Obama makes a speech a day somewhere, you now have an idea how he's collected his list--and his money. If, like me, you thought mobile marketing was still a few years away, better take a closer look. Thank you, Direct magazine.

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      February 22 2008:      Daniel Rodriguez, a close friend of my brother Michael, left me a message on Saturday, Jan. 26. It was just a short message to call him, but his voice sounded scratchy and a little panicky. I phoned back. Michael, my younger brother, had died of a massive heart attack. He was 64. For the next couple of days I tried to keep busy calling the USC Medical Center morgue, a couple of mortuaries and Mike's doctor. I got nowhere. I screwed up everything. Then my wife stepped in. In two days she made all the arrangements while I moped around and thought how Michael's death should have stunned the jazz world. But I knew it wouldn't. Michael saw his first drum set at the age of fourteen. From the minute he sat down and started beating those things you knew he was going to be a good one. He started with lessons. Within a few months he was better than the teacher. When he turned 16, my parents took him to the top jazz clubs in Los Angeles, and he'd be invited to sit in. The other musicians would go crazy when Michael played. They'd congratulate ME for being his brother. When he hit 18, the LA jazz scene wise guys called him a genius. Then came engagements with Terry Gibbs and Lionel Hampton. Both these famous pros told me he was the best jazz drummer they'd ever heard. He played around the country with Gibbs and Hampton, made recordings, got ovations from the savvy jazz crowd when he was introduced. When the leader of the Sahara Las Vegas house band found out Mike was my brother, he told the band and I became a hero--a stand-in for Mike. My cousin Judy remembers watching Johnny Carson the evening Buddy Rich, the best big band drummer of his time, played on the show. When Carson began to praise him, Buddy looked down shyly, shook his head and said, "I don't know. There is a kid out there. His name is Mike Romero, and every time I hear him play it just makes me want to put my skins down." But by his late 20s, Mike had changed. He was simply too innocent, too young and too impressionable to escape the drug culture of the music business. His work slipped. He became paranoid. He played less and less. Finally he simply stopped. Then came a series of doctors and institutions. None helped. When our mother died in 1997, he seemed to straighten out. I bought him a complete new set of drums. When we walked into the shop the manager recognized Mike right away. "Greatest drummer in the world," he told me. Mike rallied for a while, even played with some LA jazz groups, but the intensity that once made him the best had deserted him. He never regained the driving beat that had him on the road to jazz immortality. I moved from Los Angeles to Colorado, and we talked on the phone and through letters for years. He became a kind and gentle man who was always ready to help a friend, but he never quite adjusted to the world around him. Last year Michael sold our family home and rented a room from Daniel. It might have been the happiest time of his life. No trouble, no worries, money in the bank, a good friend in Daniel. We talked on the phone and he sounded strong, confident. Maybe, I thought, he had snapped out of the haze that had held him prisoner for so long. Maybe he would even play again. Not to be. Too bad that drugs derailed his destiny before he could fulfill it. Too bad the whole damn jazz world never knew him. He really was the greatest. Goodbye, drummer boy. R.I.P.

      February 11 2008:      The Super Bowl ads astonished me. Some actually focused on the product or service. A few actually tried to sell something. I liked the lone ad for GoDaddy.com. They kept the company name in the lower left corner through the entire spot, With the barrage of "branding" nonsense that surrounded them it was a smart move. Grade for the entire batch of commercials was C minus. Now here are five spots whose agencies should be called in and asked what in the hell they were thinking. If you can remember even one sponsor, congratulations. (1) A fancy new car speeds through the French countryside. It halts when it reaches the French army, circa 1814, and Napoleon steps out. (2) A gorgeous girl and a bunch of lizards hoof it to the original choreography of Michael Jackson's "Thriller." One of the lizards looks like Jackson. (3) An inept car salesman is forced to jump into a ring of fire to confront an tattooed brute wearing a bad haircut. (4) In a series of animated B/W drawings, a guy tries to push a rock up a hill while an off-camera voice drones boring copy. (5) A guy with jumper cables attached to his nipples shucks and jives until he starts a car. Now this is truly silly stuff, done to make people laugh and say they loved the commercial. The agencies get an F. The answers (1) Garmin (2) Life Water (3) Cars.com (4) Yukon Hybrid (5) Amp Energy. Goodbye until 2009, students.

      February 1 2008:      Your faithful reporter is poised once again to challenge your powers of retention. I've pulled this stunt for the past eight years. Each time I've given you all my secret plans in advance and warned that you will lose--and you do. Let me recap: The Super Bowl on Feb. 3, will be loaded with TV commercials that cost the sponsors more than I make in a year (a little Romero dry wit, there). The big brands apparently tell their ad agencies to turn their writers and art directors loose. We want memorable and creative commercials, the sponsors cry. And the creatives, freed from the pressure of actually trying to sell anything, turn out the worst spots in the history of television. An eager press is delighted. They cover the commercials the next day as if they were messages from the Almighty--more important than the game itself. So your challenge is to watch the spots and remember the sponsors. Simple as that. I'll replay the spots in my Feb. 11 posting (in words, of course) and you tell me the sponsors. Be prepared to scratch your head, gaze at the ceiling and frown. Most of you won't remember even one. It's kind of sad when you realize the sponsors paid millions to air them and not a living soul remembers. But it's only money. And like I said--I win every year.

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      January 22 2008:      Don't let them take your landline phone away. It's going to be an antique soon. Worth a lot of money. People will want to buy it from you, then sit it on their desks so visitors will say, "How cute." Yes, my friends, landline phones will bring handsome prices in 2060, if you can find one. Cell phones already are pushing landline phones into the pits and furnaces reserved for the obsolescent. Maybe you saw the recent headline that read, "US now spends more on wireless than on landlines." It's true. My own home boasts weird little machines named "LinksUs" or some such. They lurk on the highest shelves, ready to transmit our deepest secrets to God knows where. My wife and I have cell phones that fly around the room whistling the Verizon theme song. They can take pictures, slice onions and pilot small aircraft if you know how to hook them up. Even our alarm system can do more than our poor, sad sack landline phones. Press just one button and police respond in seconds. Suddenly, the landline phone geniuses have discovered that they have a "mature" industry on their hands. Too bad. When they come to confiscate your phone, tell them your dog ate it.

      January 11 2008:      Brian Clark of the Rocky Mountain News is one sharp guy. He collects oddball sports stories and lays them on us at the end of the year. Here are some of the best from the Rocky's Dec. 22 edition: (1) Before his lethal injection in Arizona, a convicted killer's last words were "Go Raiders." (2) Indiana personal trainer Kevin Shelley shattered the world record for breaking wooden toilet seat lids with his head by smashing 46 in 60 seconds (3) A Florida high school girls relay team was disqualified from a meet because the members' sports bras didn't match (4) Denise Hanitzsch, 24, won the second "Stiletto Run" in Berlin, which featured 100 women running 100 meters in high heels (5) A soccer match organized as part of a campaign against hooliganism in Germany ended when five players attacked a heckler (6) Rick "Pellet Gun" Krause, 58, defended his crown at the International Cherry Spitting Championship in Michigan with a spit of 58 feet, 1 and 1/2 inches (7) Golfer Jay Williamson picked a person from the gallery to serve as his caddie after firing his regular caddie during the first round of the Canadian Open. Thank you, Brian Clark.

      January 1 2008:      Regular readers will think I'm completely nuts when they scan this one. They'll wonder what Unidentified Flying Objects have to do with casino marketing. I'll think of something. Anyway, I had to laugh at the December 9 edition of Parade magazine. They had a scientist write an article on UFOs. That's like asking a Republican to write a nonpartisan article on the Democrat presidential contenders--or vice versa. Scientists have a code when it comes to UFOs. They don't exist--period. Break that code and say goodbye to your career. So naturally, the scientist-writer praises the scientists at SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute) who have been listening for an alien signal from space for more than 15 years with zero success. Meanwhile, those uneducated clowns in the UFO community collect sightings by the thousands every year from almost every country in the world. Video tape, film, still shots, physical traces, eyewitnesses, radar, you name it. What a waste of time, right? I mean, a scientist can dismiss all that stuff with a wave of his hand. The writer of the Parade piece even says, "If a UFO landed in my back yard I'd want to have a look inside and meet the occupants before I'd be convinced." Reminds me of the casino wise guys who told me in 1976, "Tournaments? They'll never work."

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      December 22 2007:      Have you ever plopped down in your movie theater seat with a tub of popcorn to catch some promos for upcoming films and found yourself staring at 15 minutes of fast food and car commercials? The movie-house-as-TV was kind of charming for a while--especially the local commercials. Cute, unprofessional stuff. The whole thing had a hokey qualify that was endearing. That's all changing. Now there are companies that can take a slick new commercial, fresh from the ad agency, and beam it via satellite to hundreds of movie houses simultaneously. Cinema Advertising they call it, and the big brands are lining up to buy time. If TV viewers record the shows and skip the commercials, move the same stuff to the theater where the audience can't escape. A headline in the Denver Post on Cinema Advertising the other day read, "Ad dollars seek captive viewers." Okay, you get the picture. As a direct marketing guy I have just one question. Why would any company advertise in a movie theater? Such ads can't be tracked for effectiveness, the demographics are all over the place, and while the audience can't flee, they can hate you. So why advertise in the movies? Is it just a guess? A hunch? A prayer? Or is it because others do it? Check out the Quote of the Month, to your right.

      December 11 2007:      Feeling spied on, are you? Afraid you have a dossier at Google? Wondering how you can slither out of The Information Age without making a big fuss? More and more Americans think like you do. If I leave my home and drive into Denver, I pass mini-cameras perched above the streetlights at key intersections. When I probe for information on a search engine I wonder if they have a file on all my other searches. And will I ever know how closely my primary physician guards my medical history? IBM recently bought Cognos, described as a "Business intelligence software vendor." What's that all about? When I occasionally fall for one of those online polls so I can vent, they want me to fill out a form that's a dozen lines long (I wouldn't do it if they paid me). Now Joseph Farah of World Net Daily shouts that Google is "Out of control." He calls the company, "The peeping Toms of Silicon Valley." And did you ever stare at your screen and wonder how many cookies are stacked up in your computer, just waiting to blab your innermost secrets to the world? To get around all this stuff you gotta have a plan--so here's mine. I just don't give a damn. Any questions?

      December 1 2007:      So how much "live chat" do you have on your Web site now? Or have you even considered it? In the retail sector, according to DM News, 27% of companies say they have it--and 33% say it will be one of their priorities in 2008. Live chat is what the new Internet marketer calls "Social Media." It's defined by inviting the customers to comment on and review the products they buy from the company. Maybe some casinos have started live chat programs. If so, I don't know about it. Most of the retailers do it right, though. Which means they print negative reviews as well as positive reviews. That's smart. Remember, the Internet is really a digital catalogue. They make a sale, they ship. Trouble lies in the time the product takes to reach the buyer, and the condition in which it arrives. So you see gripes about some of these things, but they give the company an opportunity to establish trust by rectifying mistakes at once--at no extra cost to the customer. Would it work with casinos? Sure, it fits right in with the loyalty marketing so many casinos do. But you'd have to take the bad reviews with the good and follow through on your guarantees. Now for a heads up: I discuss the growing variety of Internet, music and smartphone-based promotions and products in my column in the upcoming Slot Manager magazine.

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      November 22 2007:      Here's the short version of a true story I've told in my seminars at conferences and individual properties. In the 70s at Lake Tahoe, the Sahara Tahoe staged a week-long promotion. Each night a contestant could choose one of five doors. Behind one was a model of a new car. Pick that one and you win the car. No car had been won for six days. On the seventh day the contestant picked a door and when the MC jerked it open, all five doors opened. No cars behind any door. The casino had to pay off with seven new cars. To my astonishment, a similar fiasco thing just happened in Denver. The Denver Newspaper Agency and a local builder offered a $200,000 home if your key opened one of three doors. The contestants tried their keys before the start of a Broncos game and an elderly couple won. The next day they appeared in an ad. They picked their house and were packing to move in when the sponsors discovered there had been a second winner. After another drawing, the second winner got the house and the erstwhile winners sued. Public outrage followed. Result? Same as the casino. The sponsors paid off with TWO houses--and attorney fees. An expensive promotion--but it sure got a ton of ink.

      November 11 2007:      As most of you who browse this space know, I live in Colorado, south of Denver. Lovely state, wonderful people. Healthy state, too. B ut when the legislature passed the Colorado Clean Indoor Air Act in 2006, the voters weren't as happy as you might expect. Why? Because casinos were exempted. They fought the battle in the media and clean air won. An extension of the original act goes into effect on Jan. 1, 2008, and smoking will be prohibited in "any indoor area" in a bunch of new establishments, including casinos. But what is an "indoor area," and what does "open air mean." The Rocky Mountain News tried its best to clarify things last week. Seems that a review of building plans showed that several casinos in Black Hawk are set to build enclosed and semi-enclosed areas for smokers. The people in Smoke-Free Gaming and the Rocky editorial writers cried foul. But the definition of "indoor area" is in dispute because the current laws mumble when they should be precise. The Rocky decries an "end run" around the smoking ban. Kindly stay tuned.

      November 1 2007:      Diana Dilworth in DM News tells of a study by Habeas and IPSOS that claims nearly 50% of users maintain at least three e-mail addresses. So maybe consumers don't trust e-mail, as several studies show, but 74% use it every day and 96% use it every work day. So do your casino hosts use more than one address? I assume so. I mean, why ask a big player to phone in a request and find his host out of the office? Big players don't want delays and call-backs. They want action now, and you cement the relationship when you fire right back at them and say :"Sure, the weekend is open for you. Let me know what time you'll arrive so I can send the limousine." The obvious thing is to give the customer your private e-mail address--the one you give only to dozen or so whopper players and the one that you screen every day of your life. Of course, there's a risk. If the host leaves your joint and goes down the street, he'll take all the e-mail addresses he's saved. The day is here when not only your best players, but every rated player in your database can walk out of the building buried inside a SanDisk the size of your thumb. Maybe telephones and direct mail aren't so bad after all.

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      October 22 2007:      Christopher Ryan has written one marketing plan after another for some huge companies. In 1989 he put out a terrific little book named "The Direct Marketing Challenge," Need to write a plan every year? Get the book. No matter the size of the client, he recommends 25 pages And here are his key points. (1) Executive Summary, or as he prefers, "Statement of Purpose" (2) Situation Analysis (3) Prior Year's Programs and Expenditures (4) Marketing Objectives (5) Positioning Objectives (6) Vertical Marketing Objectives (7) Revenue Objectives (8) Lead Generating Objectives (9) Public Relations Objectives (10) Other Objectives (11) Marketing Strategy (12) Media Strategy--Direct Marketing (13) Media Strategy--Print Advertising (14) Trade Show Strategies (15) Sales Seminar Strategies (16) Market Planning & Research (17) Public Relations (18) Collateral Material (19) Contingency and Miscellaneous Expenses and (20) Marketing Budget Summary. Happy planning

      October 11 2007:      My wife received a self mailer last month from one of her favorite Denver metro area grocery stores. Large postcard format. The art showed vegetables, cheeses and steaks piled together. Not bad. The copy announced a "Grand Re-Opening Party." The store hadn't been closed, just remodeled inside to add more display shelves. If you shopped on the day of the party, Sept. 12., you got a 10% discount. The card arrived in our mailbox on Sept. 17. My wife phoned the store's corporate marketing department and explained the situation. Silence. "Haven't you heard about this from others?" my wife asked. "No, you're the first." My wife is pretty savvy on direct mail. :"When was it dropped?" she asked. They weren't sure. My wife's call was the first of many and the store wound up honoring the discount no matter when you brought in the card. Problem solved? Not exactly. When my five-foot-one wife returned to the store she found the newly added shelves were on top of the original shelves. "Vanilla," she said, "was about eight feet high. Vanilla!" When she threatened to bring a stool with her to shop, the store said, "Sorry, you can't do that." She shops at other stores now. But first she got her discount.

      October 1 2007:      The DM News headline read "Americans have skewed view of ad industry." Of course they have a skewed view. Most reasonable persons assume that advertising is supposed to sell things. But if that happens, it's a bonus. The main objective of ad agencies is to (1) produce memorable advertising, (2) to give the agency a reputation for "creativity," and (3) to swell the portfolios of the creative stars. But it's not the advertising that should be memorable. It's the promises the advertising makes that should be memorable. Not a hard concept, but it eludes many agencies. So in a recent study by the famous J. Walter Thompson agency, just 14% of those surveyed say that Americans respect ad people. Hey, wasn't Congress was down in that locale for a while? Other depressing survey figures: 84% say, "Too many things are over-hyped now." 72% say, "I get tired of people trying to grab my attention and sell me stuff." 47% regard "Advertising as background noise." 52% say "There's too much advertising. I would support stricter limits." That last one is a little creepy, don't you think. Makes you really wonder about the educational process.

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      Sept 22 2007:      You probably read about the Yale taste test that found three-to-five-year-old kids preferred food that came in a McDonald's wrapper. Dr. David Katz of the Yale School of Medicine said, "This study demonstrates simply and elegantly that advertising literally brainwashes children into a baseless preference for certain food products." Now Robert Passikoff, Ph. D., has fired back in the newsletter Chief Marketer. Passikoff says Dr. Katz knows, "Very little about branding" and the results of the study "Shouldn't come as a surprise to marketing and communication practitioners." I agree with that. But then Passikoff, who owns a company named Brand Keys, does a club date on branding. And that I don't agree with. The success of branding by McDonald's, Nike, Apple and others of that size all had one thing in common: tens of millions paid out to get that brand recognition. Fine. But too often, branding successes by major companies lure small companies into the brand wars, and money that could have been spent to create hard sales is wasted. I say every ad should sell something. And every ad should be tracked for cost per sale. Can you "brand" in this kind of ad? Of course--but the primary goal should be accountable advertising.

      September 11 2007:      Those upstarts at Yahoo have pushed Google out of first place in the University of Michigan's American Customer Satisfaction Index, according to a report in DM News. The annual U of Michigan report authored by Larry Freed covers e-business Web sites, search engines and portals, online news and information sites. Yahoo's customer satisfaction score was 79% on the report's 100-point scale. Will you tell me how 79% of a group of people can agree on anything? Weird. Google was just a point back at 78%, but the googlers have slipped two years in a row. The largest increase was 9% by Ask.com, a site I've never visited. And as you might imagine, AOL lost nine points and fell to 67%. AOL cuts out on me at least once a day in the busy periods, and sometimes I'm not able send or read e-mail. A box appears and tells me that their computers are overloaded, or some such. I get the idea they hate Mac users anyway. PCs get special treatment but us Mackers are still using an out-of-date browser. To tell you the truth, Yahoo looks better to me every day.

      September 1 2007:      I gave a couple of talks in Las Vegas last month to a nationwide conference named "Writing Gaming Marketing Copy That Sells." I'd say we had about 45 gaming writers attending and after I harangued them for two and a half hours most of them came up and told me they enjoyed it--and learned something. Hey! I enjoyed it, too. Writers are my favorites. Raving Consulting sponsored the conference. I started by telling the group to stop calling themselves copywriters. I think it's a demeaning term authored by New York agencies decades ago to keep the most creative people in the joint hidden away in a corner cubicle so they could underpay them. But any ad guy knows that prospects buy from information, not from glitzy pictures. Don't they? Some other do-dads I dropped on the writers: Casinos are person to person businesses, and because the GM can't meet everyone, direct mail fills the gap...art directors who use sans serif type such as Helvetica for body copy should be deported...forbidden words include such beauties as 'great,' 'exciting,' 'needs' and 'world class."...the best of my Twelve Best Lines in Casino Marketing, is 'Thank you"...the worst line in casino marketing is "Management reserves the right to...'...and never overlook the power of teasers--those lines on the front of envelopes that reveal part of, or all of, the offer inside. Pretty smart, these Raving people. Maybe I'll see you at one of their writing conferences next year.

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      August 22 2007:      Don Rickles is 81. Can you imagine that? And he's been married for 42 years. I read it just the other day in the public prints. They ran his picture, too, and he looks just like he did in the 60s and 70s when he ladled out one indignity after another to the show crowd in the old Las Vegas Sahara Casbar Lounge (and later the main room). One of my jobs as marketing director of the Sahara in those days was to get the shows plugged, so Don and I became friends. Of course, I was always throwing him curve balls. When he opened the main room following a long absence I passed out masks of his face to more than 800 guests. When he walked on stage he stopped, looked around and fumbled his first few words. I howled. On another evening I had 475-pound Arnold Chernoff, a friend of mine, seated front row center. Arnold had a ferocious wit, so when Don sauntered out and saw Chernoff, he yelled, "What the hell do you do?" and Chernoff fired back, "I'm a jockey," The audience went crazy and all Don could do was fake that smile he had perfected to buy a few seconds before answering. I loved those days and I loved Barbara and Don He could make you laugh for 45 minutes straight. Never been one like him.

      August 11 2007:      The wise guys in the sports business say that David Beckham will turn soccer into a major sport in the US. Not a chance. Tim Leiweke, president of the Anschutz Entertainment Group and owner of the Los Angeles Galaxy soccer club, told the LA Times, "There's going to be a billion-dollar impact. No question about it." Hey, if I gave Beckham a reported $20 million contract to play for my team I'd probably say that, too. The guy is a very big star. He's the Pele of our time. I read a story that claimed the Galaxy has already sold 250,000 of his jerseys (they go for $80 each). But as good as he is, the game he plays is a drag. In American football, the most exciting plays are long passes to a wide receiver who gets behind the defense. When that happens in soccer they whistle the play dead and give the ball to the other team. Change the rules to encourage more scoring? Never happen. In soccer, the winning teams usually score two or three goals at best. If they win 4-1 it's a blowout. Sure, the Mexicans, Central and South Americans love it because many of them grew up with the game. But for the average US sports nut it's a yawner. Matter of fact, I feel like a nap right now.

      August 1 2007:      The Casino Marketing Conference produced by Raving Consulting and Ascend Media sailed through its fourth year in mid-July at Paris Las Vegas. Looked good all the way, too. At this point most of the attendees are small and mid-sized casinos, but you won't find a more competitive bunch. The Conference gives awards in categories that range from casino floor promotions and Web sites to E-mail promotions and direct mail. The rules are tough because you have to prove what you got for the promotion money you spent. But they should be tough. They're based on what I've lived by for 40 years--promotions that are measurable and accountable. Your faithful reporter's name is on the awards, too (the Romero Awards). Max Rubin gave the opening keynote address, and anytime you get Max in your show you've got one of the best I've ever seen. A Toyota VP gave the luncheon talk in which he likened Toyota's marketing to casino marketing. John Acres received the Lifetime Achievement Award. The man's contribution to the modern slot machine is unequaled in our industry. And Dennis Conrad gave his famous "Best and Worst Casino Promotions of the Year" talk. Maybe I'll see you there next year. I hope so.

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      July 22 2007:      Tom Collins, of the original Rapp & Collins ad agency, carries on the most lonely crusade in advertising, The man is trying to teach ad agencies how to sell things. Every month in Direct magazine, Tom takes a hopeless ad written by some famous agency and does a quick (and brilliant) makeover. You'd think that every agency in the country would thank him. Wrong. But why? Because Tom is a direct marketer. General agencies still dominate the ad business--and direct marketing, despite occasional "integration" of the two disciplines, remains the poor relative. General guys hate direct guys. In a recent issue of Direct, Tom shows a full page 4/C ad for IBM's new "Pay by Touch" technology. In the frozen food section of a supermarket a lone customer peers inside one of the doors, on which is placed a large asterisk. The footnote reads "This finger is legal tender." Which means? This is followed by unreadable copy in small sans serif type reversed out of yellow. Tom's makeover shows a picture of IBM's Pay by Touch machine, tells why it's superior to credit cards and how stores can easily work it into their current systems. Thankless persuasion at its best.

      July 11 2007:      Chief Marketer, a good little online newsletter, had a piece last month named "The Secret of Sending Press Releases." I didn't read it. Because I've worked both sides of the street, I figured I'd give you my own secrets. As a newspaper editor, I saw plenty of press releases. Later, I wrote press releases for the old Del Webb's Sahara. My stuff always saw print, and some editors even called me and said they always looked forward to my releases. Why? Most press releases are filled with syrupy praise for the company. Mine told stories. They were written like newspaper feature stories. They were about Sahara people who did unusual things--like Buddy Hackett writing a check on the side of a grocery bag to help an Indian charity, or Joan Adams, one of our cocktail waitresses, winning the national indoor archery title just two months after she took up the sport. But my stories always got our point across--whatever it was. And I never used corporate leads, the kind that put the name of the company president in the first line. My secret was--I knew editors liked a good story as much as anyone else. Good stories always run. "Press releases" get thrown in the waste basket or chopped down to a couple of lines.

      July 1 2007:      Ed Koch had a terrific story about July 7, 2007, in the Las Vegas Sun newspaper the other day. Seems that thousands are rushing to Las Vegas to get married on that particular day and the "40 or so" wedding chapels are gearing up for a record 24 hours. The Flamingo Las Vegas alone, he said, will host 77 weddings at seven locations. And Paris Las Vegas is asking seven couples to celebrate their one-year anniversary by returning to the resort for a $777 meal. Koch wrote that 07-07-2007 "reduces to the lucky 7-7-7 for the superstitious among us." Well, maybe, but not so in numerology (7+7+2+7=23, which reduces to 5). But while there's no doubt that 7 is considered lucky, what caused it? I asked an online outfit named Answerbag, where people write in with their favorite answers to just about everything. The answers included Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, seven deadly sins, the seven seas and the seven ancient planets. I threw in Craps just for the hell of it. Bet I'm closest.

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      June 22 2007:      There was a point, a couple of years ago, when some of us thought that the Feds would cave on Internet gambling. But instead of succumbing to what seemed inevitable and easing restrictions, the opposite has happened. NewsMax.com, one of the best of the conservative news sites, says the FBI's Cyber Crime Fraud unit is a no-nonsense bunch that has bluntly warned those who live in the US not to wager or transfer money electronically for gambling. The FBI, says NewsMax, also has targeted the owners of virtual casinos, gaming rooms and off-track betting parlors--and has had some recent successes. About a dozen of such cases are "in motion," says an FBI official. The number of offshore casinos is approaching one hundred, and the primary market is the US. NewsMax reports that Sebastian Sinclair of the New York consulting firm Christiansen Capital Advisers, says Americans lost more than $7.2 billion online in 2006. I had to blink a couple of time at that stat. I thought most online bets were small--and if they are, can you imagine how many Americans are playing?

      June 11 2007:      You can expect to see more and more funny TV spots in the months to come. Nielsen now offers ratings on commercial breaks. This is very good news to general advertising agencies, who can now let their creative talents run wild. Agencies love to dream up goofy spots that sometimes end with the name of the sponsor on display for as much as, oh, half a second. You see a lot of them in the Super Bowl. Consequently you remember the commercials but not what they were supposed to sell. The truth is, humorous commercials aren't supposed to sell anything. They're supposed to be memorable--nothing more. But as your faithful reporter has declaimed so many times, it's not the commercials that should be memorable. It's the promises they make that should be memorable. Nevertheless, when agencies ponder what type of commercials will do well in the ratings, the answer invariably will be slapstick. Clients who put their faith in branding and who sign up to check their ratings will be delighted. Imagine winning the commercial ratings war. Joy! Better check what happened to sales. Claude Hopkins, the father of modern advertising, summed up his philosophy in five words: "People don't buy from clowns."

      June 1 2007:     Kelly K. Spors, who covers small businesses for the Wall Street Journal, wrote a nice piece on keywords last month. Keywords are the ones most likely to be typed into the various search engines by those who seek your product or service. Up until recently, picking keywords had been a guessing game--and still is for many. When my wife and I began to build our new home in early 2005, we set up a Web site and picked several keywords we thought would pull viewers. One of them was "dream home." Bad guess. Everyone who builds new homes uses it. Now Google Analytics and ClickTracks can take out a lot of the guesswork and HitTail.com can analyze your site and suggest keywords to use. The latest technique is to add content to your site, or a blog, because the larger number of words lets you pop in or repeat more keywords. And a blog can do something else--such as create the one-on-one conversation that made direct mail so successful. So I wondered how many of the major casinos had their own blogs to help cement the relationship with their best customers. I searched for two days and didn't find one. But I did discover something else--that if you go to Google and pick a casino name, then follow it with the words "Slot Blog," you'll pull up 266,000 sites, or more. Who ARE the people behind this. I'll answer it in my next column for Slot Manager magazine.

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      May 20 2007:      Chief Marketer, a terrific little online newsletter, recently led me to an excerpt from Watch This, Listen Up, Click Here, a new book by David Verklin and Bernice Kanner on "Advergaming." Across the globe, say the authors, there are 100 million PlayStation2s and 40 million Xboxes, and in the US, video games make more money than movie box offices. Virtually every big advertiser from Volvo and Burger King to Nike and Visa has gone virtual, and one of the big winners is the US Army. With enlistments falling, the Army paid 7.3 million for a game named "America's Army." Of course, they took a beating in the press but all of a sudden the critics stopped carping. Since the game was released in 2002, more than 7 million users have registered (most anonymously) and 10,000 to 50,000 news ones are downloading the game daily. Studies show that between 20% and 40% of new Army recruits have played it. And, a recent survey by Nielsen says that three out of four homes with guys under 34 have game systems. Is the Verklin-Kanner book going to be a bestseller? Bet on it.

      May 11 2007:      In the mid-70s, as marketing director at the old Del Webb's Sahara in Las Vegas, I'd gather my staff and we'd talk about ways to encourage more play. Our ideas were fun, but not practical. Then I read an article about a company that manufactured negative ion generators. Negative ions, as I recall, buoy the human spirit, make you feel better, even embolden you. In nature, I read, negative ions were generated by thunderstorms. So I wrote the company and asked how they might work in a casino. The reply was enthusiastic, also costly and impractical, so the idea died. Other casinos put their faith in certain types of canned music, or themed interiors, or off-color comedians. Our casino pit guys swore that when Liberace played the main rooms, players came out of the show mellow and subdued. But when we had Buddy Hackett, they'd roar out of the big room with fire in their eyes and head for the tables. Now a friend of mine, Denis Floge, thinks that chocolate can inspire more play. He tried it, too, and it worked. Look for his full story in the July issue of Global Gaming.

      May 1 2007:      Initialese has pretty much reached its apogee in modern marketing. But if you don't know what the initials mean, you can't make sense out of the stories or articles. Luckily., your faithful reporter is on hand to enlighten you, otherwise you could wander forever in the acronymic wasteland. For example, what does this mean? "SMBs are turning to PDAs to improve their CPAs." Hah hah, you laugh. Everyone knows what CPA means. Oh, do they? The translation: Small to Midsize Businesses are turning to Personal Digital Assistants to improve their Cost Per Acquisition. ("Personal Digital Assistants," by the way, are cell phones.). So I'm starting a new feature to demystify the current fads. Samples follow: PPA (Pay Per Action, now in its beta test phase by Google); SEM (Search Engine Marketing); EEC (E-mail Experience Council); VWC (Virtual World Conference, recently held in New York); PIP (Package Insert Programs, part of the new media); IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau, as in "The IAB estimated online sales hit 16 Billion in 2006." Now you are armed--but only temporarily.

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      April 21 2007:      So EchoStar Communications and Google have teamed up to create an automated system for measuring TV advertising on the Dish Network. Good luck to them. The system is already in place in EchoStar's set-top boxes, so that's no problem. And the boxes can measure which commercials viewers watch, and which ones they skip. But the problem is, what does that really tell an advertiser? If your spot gets watched a lot, does that mean it's creating sales? Maybe, maybe not. But Google apparently believes it does, and intends to use anonymous data from the set-top boxes to bill advertisers for the audience that watches the spots for long periods of time. Can they sell such a service to advertisers? Not to me, they can't--or to any direct marketer, I'd guess. But many large companies are so impressed with anything their agency recommends that they abdicate their responsibility. So I expect the plan to be hailed by the ad community as a miracle and snapped up by all those companies with multi-million dollar budgets. Same old, same old.

      April 12 2007:      Casino direct mail has changed. Boy, has it. Letters, the old standbys, have morphed from single pages of stationery to one section of a six or eight panel brochure--right next to the zip-out coupons that carry the offers. The new format probably is cheaper to produce but may cost more to mail. And it looks like an ad--not like person to person communication. What it does well is place the offer front and center. But in direct mail, the list rules. And that's the reason a bad mailer sent to the right list will still pull. Send a beautiful package to the wrong list and it's a disaster. The other thing that has changed is the type style. Just about everything, even the letter, is now in sans serif type--the kind writer Vrest Orton called "The most impossible type ever invented." as far back as 1977. But art directors who are ignorant of .the purpose of printing (which is to make reading easy) think sans serif is "clean" and :"cool," so that's what we get. I console myself with the thought that the pendulum will swing back, and that single page letters and Roman type will return. But hey, in fifteen or twenty years all mail might be delivered right to your hand-held pod. Dismal thought.

      April 1 2007:      Warning! The words you are about to read are dangerous, Remember them and be wary. They are "original," "innovative, " "creative," "new and different." In the general advertising community such words are hallowed. In the direct marketing community they almost always spell trouble. Why? Because they all mean "untested." The strength of direct marketing lies in its ability to test a direct mail piece or a direct response ad before rollout begins. Without testing you're simply guessing and hoping for the best--yet it's common in most industries (including the casino biz).to launch huge campaigns without ever testing up front to see if you have a hit or a miss. General advertising agencies put their faith in their creative people. We do that in direct marketing, too, but only after they've proven the ad or mailing package will pull the response that's necessary to pay for the placements--and then some. So why do some companies rush out flawed work that costs thousands to produce and tens of thousands to place--and accept whatever response they get? That's easy. I have no idea.

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      March 21 2007:      Deliver me from newly elected politicians. Too many of them think they have to show the flag so they invariably come up with nonsensical "feel good" legislation. Case in point was a recent bill to "stop unwanted junk mail" in Colorado. A similar proposal appeared in Montana. My guess is that both bills were rushed to the floor because the sponsors thought that some other legislator might beat them to it. The uproar that arose from the Postal Service, unions, businesses, printers (and others) showed that both sponsors did little or no homework and had no idea of the job-killing impact such dumb ideas might cause. The Colorado bill would have allowed those on a "do not mail" list who received mail to collect a $500 civil penalty, but exempted "political organizations." Sweet. Both bills died in committee. My firm belief is that newspapers started the term "junk mail" and if they had their way they'd ban ALL advertising mail--except their subscription mail, of course. I also believe that a relatively small core of activists keeps alive a ridiculous myth--that everyone hates "junk mail." The battle rages.

      March 12 2007:      The recent death of singer Frankie Laine brought back memories of the most spectacular golf event ever staged in Las Vegas--the old Desert Inn "Tournament of Champions." Howard Capps, former pro at the DI, created the T of C in 1953 for the new Desert Inn Country Club. Along with it came an equally spectacular Calcutta Auction in which hundreds of DI rollers invited by the casino "bought" the tournament players. Calcuttas fell out of favor with the PGA so you don't' see them anymore--but the T of C Calcutta might have been the largest of all time. In 1955, Laine ("Mule Train," Wild Goose" & others) bought golfer Gene Littler in a T of C Calcutta that amassed a purse of more than $250,000, and collected a bundle when Littler won. Laine bought Littler again in 1956, and Gene won again. Could he make it three straight? In 1957, with the T of C the richest tournament in golf, Laine and his wife Nan dashed from hole to hole to push their man to victory. Gene won his third straight with the Calcutta at more than $400,000. The T of C lasted only a short time at the Desert Inn before the PGA realized what a valuable property it was and took it away. But my memories of Frankie and Nan are just as strong as ever for a very good reason. Gene's third win produced my first byline story in Sports Illustrated--a piece about the astonishing Littler-Laine winning streak.

      March 1 2007:      Martin Conroy died on Dec. 19, 2006, and the New York Times noted his passing with a laudatory story. But only if you write direct mail (as I do) would you remember the sales masterpiece that Conroy created--perhaps the best the craft has even seen. His letter, written to increase subscription sales for the Wall Street Journal, began this way: "On a beautiful late spring afternoon, 25 years ago, two young men graduated from the same college. They were very much alike, these two young men. Both had been better than average students, both were personable, and both--as young college graduates are--were filled with ambitious dreams for the future." In the direct mail business we call this a "story lead." You don't see many because they're hard to write. Conroy's letter continued: "Recently, these men returned to their college for their 25th reunion. They were still very much alike. Both were happily married. Both had three children. And both, it turned out, had gone to work for the same midwestern manufacturing company after graduation and were still there. But there was a difference. One of the men was manager of a small department of that company. The other was its president." The difference, Conroy goes on to say, was that one had access to information and the other didn't--followed by a series of WSJ benefits . Conroy wrote the letter when Nixon was president. It's still is use today, unchanged after all these years and still the best of its kind ever written. R.I.P.

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      February 1 2007:      Continuing last month's piece about the definition of "creativity" in advertising, the following. "Send us your copywriters," the late David Ogilvy told the general advertising community. "We will teach them how to sell." Ogilvy was a longtime champion of direct marketing who proved his faith with consistency. Here's one of his classic headlines: "At 60 miles per hour, the loudest sound you can hear in the new Rolls Royce is the ticking of the electric clock." The company's chief engineer reportedly saw the ad and exclaimed, :I've got to do something about that damned clock." Later, Ogilvy wrote an ad for Hathaway shirts that contained 14 benefits. He called advertising that entertains, "A sin," and once said, "There is no need for advertisements to look like advertisements. If you make them look like editorial pages, you will attract about 50 per cent more readers." If you define advertising "creativity" by the products or services it sells, there was never a more "creative" guy than Ogilvy. Yet when he died the ad community remembered him mostly for a throwaway line in a speech, "The consumer is not a moron. She is your wife." He scolded general advertising creatives with that zinger and they tried to turn it against him..

      February 10 2007:      What are we to say about Super Bowl TV commercials this year? Advertisers flung open their pocketbooks; a 30-second spot went for $2.6 million; ad experts, columnists and online reporters raved about them. Yet, with a few exceptions, they were not ads at all. They were comedy shorts, with the product an afterthought. Sick, some of it. Wasteful, practically all of it. The game has become quicksand for client money and wonderful fun for the ad agencies that are free, for the only time in the year, to produce work in which selling anything is not a consideration. So as we have done for the past six years, I will describe a spot and you guess the product. Answers at bottom: (1) A Japanese movie monster flattens a bridge and a car and is attacked and zapped by a giant human in a hero suit (2) A group of men in business suits camping in the forest are attacked by unseen dart blowers and run off a cliff as they dash for safety (3) We see a shot of Stonehenge, then a child throwing a rock, then other quick clips of rocks in various forms (4) A guy on a chopper is attacked by giant creatures, including an ugly spider, yet outruns them all (5) A guy dressed as a heart is attacked and beaten by various villains who represent deadly diseases. And that's it for this year. Just remember, friends, that it's not the advertising that should be memorable. It's the promises the advertising makes that should be memorable--but there are none. The sponsors: (1) Garmin Personal Navigation System (2) Career Builders.Com (3) Prudential Insurance (4) Hewlett Packard (5) BeatYourRisk.Com. Funny, most of it, but very sad.

      February 20 2007:      Did you ever doubt that casinos were leaders in the database marketing revolution? If you did, it's time to take a look at what some respected database marketing experts are telling Circulation Management magazine about the state of such marketing for 2007. "Database marketing is moving out of the back room and firmly into the strategic fabric of the marketing organization," said David Williams, president and CEO of Merkle, Inc. Moving out of the back room in 2007? Where the hell have those companies been for the last 40 years? Now listen to this from Melissa Campanelli of DM News. "...the building of prospect databases will be one of the issues marketers will be focusing on in 2007." Just starting to focus on database marketing in 2007? Those guys are really out of it. Your faithful reporter discovered the power of database marketing in 1964, and I've been its champion ever since. It's the only form of advertising you can track for effectiveness, and that alone should have put it in the forefront of marketing strategy. It gained ground in the casino business after I hammered away with columns about it in IGWB, and by the early 90s it was king. Credit goes to all those casino marketers who adopted it early on and stayed with it. Few outside our business know we were so influential in the database breakout.

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      January 1 2007:      The most consequential news on the first day of 2007 will not be about any of the nation's domestic or foreign problems, nor about any medical miracles, industry accomplishments or stock market swings. Instead, it will concern the odds on the annual college football bowl games--and later, the results in excruciating detail. This is important stuff to the millions of us who prefer the success stories of the sports page to the tales of failures so prominent in the general news sections. Later come the All-America teams, more or less finishing off the collegians. Your faithful reporter has always thought All-America selections were silly--except for one put together by Stanley Woodward decades ago. Here are the players I can still remember from that first football Dream Team: DeBelza, St. Mary's; Awn, Wisconsin; Moonova, Miami; Cheerforole, Notre Dame; Alhailta, USC, DeIza, Texas, and you can take it from there. I told you it was silly.

      January 11 2007:      In 1977, author Vrest Orton, founder of the catalog company "The Vermont Country Store," wrote an article for National Review named "Why Johnny Can't Read." This piece, well ahead of its time, should be read by all art directors and designers--especially those who work on books for children. Some selected quotes from Orton. "The more we spend building bigger and more luxurious schools...the less Johnny can read. Parents are disgusted...yet are seldom aware of a major reason...in the last 10 years American book publishers, ignorant of the purpose of printing, have introduced the most impossible type ever invented...I refer to a blunt, stark, rigid type called sans serif...any type that makes the message difficult to read is wrong...the function of a type face is to make the page agreeable and pleasant to read and the classic serif (Roman) types achieve that purpose.. Sans serif does just the opposite,,,each letter stands alone and yells for attention...there are no contrasts...Sans serif type is a mongrel...the sheer effort of trying to read such a crude type is too much, and Johnny says the hell with it."

      January 22 2007:      Hey casino marketers--if you're going to push benefits in your advertising, be specific about them. Here are a couple of illustrations that drive home my point. In the fourth edition of Which Ad Pulled Best, the editors tell of the US Envelope Company's launch of a self-sealing envelope. Benefits included "sanitary," "novel," "different," "better" and "Humid weather never affects it." Not bad but vague, and they all missed the mark. The wining headline read, "Avoid Licking Glue." Now that's specific. In another test by a packaging company, the headline on their ad read "If it's a packaging problem, it's our baby," illustrated by a mother and child. The ad ran a very poor second to "Jake LaMotta, 160-lb fighter, fails to flatten Mono paper cup." The picture of Jake and the victorious paper cup. proved a benefit the first ad lacked. Under TIP OF THE WEEK

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Evaluating creative; rules have changed

      December 22 2006:      The headline in DM News read, "How to evaluate creative." All of us who are in the creative business have different opinions on this and we never hesitate to inflict them on others, most of whom are puzzled that we should get so crazy about headlines and copy and such. Anyway, the author points out three ways to "evaluate creative." Does the ad have information about the product and its unique selling proposition? Does it state this information clearly and concisely? Is the execution intrusive and compelling?" This is straight out of the general ad agency playbook, circa 1965, BDM (before direct marketing). "Concisely" is code for "Keep the copy short." In direct marketing you keep writing until you've pointed out every benefit--which is why some DM copy runs hundreds of words. "Intrusive" used to be a creative watchword 45 years ago because writers were trying to bully everyone who picked up the magazine into reading the ad. DMers know that you never write for everyone; you write only for those who have a need or a predisposition for the product. Nobody else matters. More next month.

What makes Ira run? It's hard to explain

      December 11 2006:      One guy I really admire is Ira David Sternberg, who is a Las Vegas Hilton PR executive until he dashes in to the nearest phone booth and emerges as the host of "Lunchtime With Ira." It's hard to explain exactly what this Monday show is because it's on television, radio and the Internet. It's on channel 777 in Hawaii, on KDWN in Las Vegas, and on KFNX in Phoenix. The thing is webcast, podcast and archived. Did I mention that it's live at the Hilton? But wait! Here's comes Ira again--out of one phone booth and into another. This time he emerges as the "Las Vegas Notebook," a weekly humor piece, and I must say that he consistently amazes me with one-liners. Examples: "The National Finals Rodeo is the one event in Las Vegas that ropes everybody in." (Give me a rim shot, Tommy.). "The Society of Seven were inducted into the Las Vegas Walk of Fame. Will the walk feature 14 feet?" Ta-DUM-bum. Well, you get the idea. The guy does everything,and your faithful reporter may have helped him along by suggesting he should write a book about Las Vegas. I'm still waiting.

He's still "stoked" by the casino biz

      December 1 2006:      I gave a talk to an audience of Denver business types yesterday. They were hungry for news about casinos--and I find the same eagerness wherever I go in the country. We're in a magic business that enthralls and fascinates the average person. They just can't get enough of it. I described how Las Vegas casinos used to be so dead in December that they canceled their shows and sent out press releases with the word "Dark.," after the dates. I told them about the rise of tournaments, the shift from mechanical slots to electro mechanicals, then to electronics, and finally to the modern computer games. I described how my partners and I brought the cash advance business out in the open in 1980, and gave rise to the forest of ATMs and cash machines you see clustered around casino cashier cages these days. I told them about the first casino floor promotion at the Sahara in 1962 (your faithful reporter organized and directed it). And to tell you the truth, it was fun to relive all of that stuff. After 46 years in the casino business (and counting) I'm still as stoked as ever. (Thanks for lending me the word, Don.)

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The Internet as seen from 10 years ago

      November 22 2006:      What well-known prognosticator wrote this about the Internet almost ten years ago? "The Internet stirs the imagination. It stomps its foot and demands attention. It simply won't be ignored...Some casino Web sites look like the hotel brochure chopped up into screen-sized pieces. Same old shots of buildings, logos and happy people. Same language, too. The shows are 'fast paced,' the food is 'fabulous' and 'experience' is always used as a verb...But there's a sameness out there. You expect more (from a casino Web site) and there's a letdown because it's all so traditional...Advertising on the Internet is still new and we have time to improve. The bad news is that we're moving at the speed of a glacier...Not so with e-mail. In 15 or 20 years the receipt of a personal letter will incite the same delighted amazement that overwhelms you today at the sight of a 1932 Ford roadster trundling along in the slow lane...E-mail is fast, efficient and cost effective. But it's the essence of high tech without the charm of high touch, Handy it is. Personal it ain't." Okay, I confess. It was your faithful reporter in my second book, "Secrets of Casino Marketing." Fun to look back.

Time has changed the press release

      November 11 2006:      Columnist Richard Levey, writing in Direct magazine, tells of an ad agency that offered a $2,000 cash prize (to charity) for the best story about the agency's reopening. Not a word saw print--no surprise there. But the truth is, reporters and editors roll their eyes at many of the PR releases that cross their desks and in general have a low regard for the people who write them. Sure, they may use the information in a press release, but the release is almost never printed word for word because it's so loaded with fancy adjectives and shameless plugs for the company. It wasn't always like that. The first PR people were ex-reporters who wrote releases just like they formerly wrote news stories. They plugged the company but the mentions were fact-based and the leads always had a hook. In short, the "press releases" were written as news or feature stories and often saw print exactly as they were submitted. True story: in my first newspaper job (with the Las Vegas Review-Journal) we had an entertainment columnist who used to "write" his column by pasting together press releases from the casinos. Wasn't bad, either.

Telly took big gamble, got us off the ground

      November 1 2006:      I get fifty or sixty e-mails a day, many of them newsletters that deal with online marketing. So when I saw an ad for Business-to-Business lead generation on a "pay per lead" basis, I took a look. They lost me with a dumb first line in the copy that told me it was an "exciting" online product. But it did remind me of Telly Savalas. How so? When my partners and I started Players Club International in the 80s, we needed a celebrity spokesman--someone who could give us instant recognition. So after careful planning we launched a thorough search for just the right person. That took about 30 seconds. Someone said, "What about Telly Savalas," and we all said yes and we phoned his agent and got the deal in ten minutes. Since we had no money to speak of, we used the TV version of "pay per lead." They call it "PI" or "per inquiry." We paid the network or station per phone call and since Telly really drew the calls, everyone wanted our spot. We generated tens of thousands of leads and paid the lowest rate possible, "PI." Telly came out okay, too. He gambled with us by taking Players Club stock instead of cash. Our stock wasn't worth much then, but later zoomed to $35 a share. Telly had 200,000 shares. "Pay per lead" indeed.

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Facts alone are cold; use a personal touch

      October 21 2006:      When you're writing to casino customers and trying to persuade them to visit your store, does it take anything more than just the offer to get results? Get set for a long and involved answer. First, offer alone might be good enough if that's all you wanted to accomplish with your mail. But with an opportunity to talk one-to-one with a customer, why stop there? Would you tell your convention sales people, for example, to present "just the facts" when selling? They'd revolt. Sales people make friends, establish themselves as honest and dependable and truly concerned about making your meeting the best ever--and the sale is half made.Letters can speak with the same warm and personal tone, and they can reach thousands in one mailing. But what makes the personal letter work? To start, it reads like I'm writing now. It's short on adjectives and long on benefits. It uses contractions, which is the way we all speak. It's written first person. It favors "talking" over"writing" and in doing so wipes away the stale claims and unimaginative verbiage that infests too much of casino mail. And finally, it often makes you smile at statements you never expected to hear from a casino.There's much more, of course, but I'll cover it in a future piece.

Art directors on top; coupons long gone

      October 12 2006:      Seen any coupons in casino advertising lately? Nope, the coupon is long gone, even though studies show that ads with coupons draw more readers than ads without them. A coupon tells the prospect that you have something to offer her and that she can get it with a phone call. For years most advertising companies understood that and took advantage of it. But that was before art directors, not writers, became the favored creative force in the ad business. Notice I said "favored," which in no way should be construed to mean "best." Many art directors hate words because they clutter up the page. That's why they make design elements out of them. But coupons they really hate. They're offended by anything that gets in the way of their design or that tries tries to sell anything. The latter is what coupons do best. But never mind. The design is king. You'd think art directors would have at least a nodding acquaintance with reading comprehension. But no. Hard-to-read sans serif type, reverse outs and weird combinations of yellow copy on magenta rule the day. The art director is king. Too bad. Maybe it's just a cycle we're going through. Or sun spots. Or pole shift.

Tables need Win Cards more than ever now

      October 1 2006:      Ted Gottlieb phoned the other day to remind me that we used to meet once a month for breakfast in the Bistro of the old Sahara-Tahoe at Lake Tahoe. The topic was always the same--Ted' s driving desire to increase casino BJ play by the simple act of educating the players (he was a dealer at the time for Sahara-Tahoe). The players at his table, he told me, would stick around longer if someone taught them the damn game. One day he brandished a prototype of a handsome teaching aid he named the "Win Card." A turn of the dial, among other things, told the player when to stand or ask for a hit. I told him I liked the idea but convincing casinos to educate their players might be a tough sell . "I'm persistent," he said, smiling. He sure was. Last month, "Win Cards",turned 20 years old. Says Gottlieb, who has installed his invention in more than 165 casinos, "I hoped to provide an industry standard for teaching players the games. The future of tables demands it. Win Cards should be cross marketed to slot players, for example. Poker proved that card games are still popular, but we have to educate the players first."

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Oyster slurping? It's on the menu at G2E in Vegas

      September 22 2006:       I'm speaking on a direct mail panel at G2E in Las Vegas on Nov. 13. After that I'll wander though the exhibits to see some old friends. Then, Shazam! It's off to the Food & Beverage displays in another part of the hall. Heck, I still have stuff I picked up at last year's F&B show, including a bottle of instant hand cleaner. My pal Larry Close dragged me into the F&B show and once inside my eyes widened. Never saw so much food--and everyone wanted to give us a sample (we took them). We sipped wine (I forget how many kinds), sampled new drinks, and even watched pastry chefs compete for a title. I'd guess we saw about 50 or 60 booths. This year there are 120. They include cooking demonstrations, wine tasting, cocktail demonstrations, a uniform fashion show, Neon Chefs Culinary Competition, and something named the Mohegan Sun Oyster Open featuring the Oyster Virgin Sacrifice Slurping Competition. I'm not to sure how close I'll get to an oyster slurping match, but I'll be there. You can bet on it.

Bye-bye slot machines, hello to the AUGDs

      September 12 2006:      That was a neat piece of work by Patrick Leen and Tom Nelson in the August issue of Casino Enterprise Management magazine. The two former Michigan gaming regulators seek the demise of the term, "slot machine." They write, "Despite a quarter century of technological advances that have morphed low stakes, coin-operated mechanical devices into large jackpot, computer driven cashless systems, many cling to a belief in the archetypal slot machine." Of course, they have a point. But it reminds me of the guy who said, "Everyone complains about the weather but nobody ever does anything about it." I mean, if Pat and Tom want a change in terminology maybe they should start a contest to rename the, uh, unknown objects that stand around by the thousands in the big joints. They actually had a ghost of a new name in their fourth paragraph when they referred to those, uh, unknown objects as "automated gaming devices." That's not bad. We could call them AUGDs for short, pronounced, "Aw, God." (All right, wise guy, suppose YOU try.)

Turning bathrooms into profit centers

      September 1 2006:      Chief Marketer, an online Prism Business Media property, publishes a feature named "Choice Links of the Week." Included in the Aug. 22, edition were links to stories on advertising that make you wonder just what in hell is happening to the profession. Play-Doh is experimenting with aromas, including a "limited edition" of Eau de Play-Doh. The Starwood Hotels are working on "olfactory branding." And a US company has announced a patented system to print ads on grocery store conveyer belts. A friend of mine, Nate Ortiz, came up with that same idea in 1999. Did he patent it? Not sure, but I do know that Safeway turned him down. Meanwhile, the Brits have clinched the no-class award with ads on the mirrors of public bathrooms. Little do they know that Danish comedian Victor Borge came up with a much better idea to turn the bathroom into a profit center. On stage at the Las Vegas Sahara in the 80s, Borge joked, "I had to use the toilet here last night, and it took three cherries to get in." Pause. "And three oranges to get out."

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Word genius Ogilvy didn't know grammar

      August 24 2006:      The late David Ogilvy has always been a favorite of mine. If you're a direct marketer you have to love the guy "Send us your copywriters," he once told general ad agencies. "We will each them how to sell." Ogilvy wrote wonderful copy that sold everything from Hathaway shirts to Rolls Royces, and this is how he explained it: "I don't know the rules of grammar. If you're trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think. We try to write in the vernacular." See, that's what I mean about Ogilvy. The guy was a maverick. He wrote copy, he wrote books, he gave the best speeches on direct marketing I've ever heard, and he didn't worship the celebrated "creatives" of Madison Avenue. "In the modern world of business," Ogilvy said, "it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create." And for ads that didn't fit his standards, he had a particularly icy put-down: "Some manufacturers illustrate their advertisements with abstract paintings. I would only do this if I wished to conceal from the reader what I was advertising." You were so right, Mr. Ogilvy. R.I.P.

The do-not-call list now at 107 million

      August 13 2006:      In October, the population of the United States will reach the 300 million mark, highest ever. But what's just as remarkable is that more than 107 million persons have signed up for the national do-not-call registry. Melissa Campanelli of DM News reports that Americans have "embraced" the registry. The rush of signups hit 10 million in the first four days after the registry's launch on June 27, 2003, Campanelli writes. By Sept. 30, nearly 52 million had joined and the numbers have crept steadily higher ever since. To look at it another way, the 107 million represents 76% of US adults. The FTC apparently was delighted because it received "just" 1.2 million complaints in 2005, indicating "a high degree of compliance" by the telemarketing industry. I pass these figures on because major casinos do a ton of telemarketing, and if more than three fourths of adults hate to be called, it should give you pause. Maybe you don 't have a problem. But it wouldn't hurt to review the rules and regulations your people use on the telephone, then check when they call and how often they call. Just a thought.

Romero comments on the Romeros

      August 1 2006:      The second annual Romero Awards for casino marketing were handed out on July 20, at the conclusion of Casino Marketing the 2006 National Conference, at Paris las Vegas. And once again your faithful reporter was honored to be part of the process. It's still a bit strange to see my name on an award and to hear my work extolled in such fancy phrases. One gentleman, on stage to pick up his winning submission, said, "It's an honor to meet you." That impressed me, because I don't think I'm anyone special. But I certainly was obsessed with the idea that advertising should be measurable and accountable (the basis on which the Romeros are judged). In the beginning of my casino marketing career in 1960 at Del Webb's Sahara Las Vegas, it worried me that I committed company ad money without knowing exactly what it accomplished. By the second year I started to find out--and some of the results dismayed me. About that time I did my first large mailing, and measured expenditures against results. What a revelation! After that, I was sold on direct marketing--and I pushed he industry to adopt it at the expense of general advertising if necessary. When I began to write my marketing column in IGWB in 1985, I wrote that I still didn't know of a single casino with a direct marketing department. I pounded away at that theme for the next 20 years. Well, you know what happened. If I have a legacy, it's the swing to database marketing.

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Don't discount friendship; it's a key marketing tool

      July 24 2006:      Why, when your casino doesn't have all the jazz and perks of your competition, do your regular players keep coming back? There are several reasons, of course, not the least of which is what syndicated columnist Harvey MacKay calls "Likability." MacKay believes that people buy from people they like--and while it may sound simplistic, it's not. The plain fact is, your key people are (as MacKay says) genuine, pleasant, sincere, easy to talk with and friendly. Those kinds of people not only draw customers from the competition--they hold them as well. In a recent column MacKay quotes Lee Iacocca, who said, "Anyone who doesn't get along with people has earned the kiss of death...because all we've got around here are people." As a newcomer in the casino business in the early 60s, I worked for the late Herb McDonald at the Sahara in Las Vegas. The guy was a genius at making friends. I saw him in action enough times to know that being interested in other people (in this case our customers) was worth millions to our casino. I've been a believer ever since.

Forget those keywords; search by using images

      July 12 2006:      An article by Gary Stix in the current Scientific American magazine could signal the beginning of the end for the way we search the Internet. And when changes in the Internet are about to happen, my casino marketing genes always kick in. Stix names his story, "A Farewell to Keywords," and makes the point that "content-based image retrieval"(using images to search for images) is surging due to "Intriguing advances that sidestep the need for keywords." Microsoft Research, says Stix, has already identified a list of uses for Web-enabled camera phones. For example, a prospect in a department store could photograph a stove and relay the image as a file to a server that shoots back a Web page from Consumer Reports. A Microsoft spokesman says the company wants to assemble a database of billions of images captured by a search engine--and be able to retrieve them in a fraction of a second. Google is in the act, too, but rarely if ever comments on future plans. So what say you, casino marketers? Can you find a use for the new technique. I came up with a couple just writing this--which means you should have no problem.

Play with casino money;Survey: 52.8 million of us
gambled in the past year

      July 1 2006:      A household income of $95,000 a year doesn't mean the family is set for life, but it certainly allows for enough discretionary cash to hit the slots and tables. And as the latest Harrah's gaming survey shows, casino visitation was highest among adults with a 95-Grand income (31%, to be exact). Harrah's calls its survey "Profile of the American Gambler," and every casino should write the company a thank-you note. Some of the findings were lower than popular perceptions I've seen in the public prints. Seems that 52.8 million Americans age 21 or older (25 % of the US population) visited a casino to gamble at least once during a year. I've read estimates up to 90%. It's popularly reasoned that the North East region of the nation produces the most gamblers. But the North East had 28% versus 33% for the West. In the introduction to my first book, Casino Marketing, I said the industry was "...outrunning its memories,"and that it was "...in the stretch and sprinting hard to take over America." I wrote that in 1994. Close, but just a touch exuberant.

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Play with casino money;Casino creatives nailed;
John on the warpath

      June 24 2006:      Bob Bly, the most prolific "how to" writer in