A City Of Contrasting Narratives

The most critical point is the vast, echoing canyon between a story told and a story lived. A city's official voice, amplified by millions of dollars, speaks of welcome and fabulousness to the outside world, while its own citizens whisper a different tale of economic alienation into the digital ether, a dissonance that no marketing campaign can truly silence.

A 60-second television spot unfurled itself during the pageantry of a National Football League game.

A meticulously crafted promise. A dream sequence of energy and excitement, tested and re-tested on focus groups until it gleamed. The numbers returned, pristine and validating. An 87 percent favorability rating. A statistical triumph. The advertisement performed its function beautifully, resonating with the intended audience, the visitors who exist in the Las Vegas of the imagination, the ones who come for a weekend and leave with memories.

It was a message in a bottle, thrown out into the sea of the national market, and the messages that came back were full of adoration. The product was sound. The packaging, exquisite.

But in its own home, the bottle washed ashore and was met not with celebration, but with a quiet, persistent tapping. A few loud voices, the chief marketing officer said.

Five negative articles out of three hundred. A small number. Statistically insignificant, perhaps. Except four of those voices were local. They were not consumers of the fantasy; they were its producers, its custodians. Their commentary was not about the advertisement's aesthetics but about its omissions. They spoke of the creeping cost of existence in a city built for spectacle.

The price of a meal, a ticket, a tank of gas. The quiet indignity of being unable to afford the pleasures you spend your working life facilitating for others. The feeling of becoming a stranger in your own backyard, a service worker in a theme park where the price of admission to a regular life is always going up.

The response from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority was one of disappointment.

A confusion that the troops were not rallying. That the narrative was not being embraced. Their language is the language of control, of shaping perception and managing outcomes. The talk is of future catalysts. Of a giant, pixelated Sphere and a formidable stadium, great monuments to a future that will, surely, be profitable.

It is a vision that looks up and out, toward the skyline and the horizon, to the next big event and the next wave of tourists. It is a gaze that can sometimes miss the things happening on the ground. The simple, complex arithmetic of a paycheck against the rising cost of living. The story told not in a press release, but in a grocery line.

* A tale of two cities, both named Las Vegas. One broadcast on television, the other lived on its streets. * The metrics of success. 87 percent approval from a distant audience. A near-unanimous shrug from the local one.
• Four articles. A footnote in a media report, a headline in the employee break room. The subject the cost of staying when the party is for everyone else. * The official strategy. To change the narrative. Forgetting, perhaps, that a narrative is not changed by decree, but by experience.

Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority's new advertising campaign has been warmly embraced ⁘ but not locally, the agency's chief marketing ...

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