Good and bad ideas in marketing; Small is beautiful, Vegas

Break out a flagon of whatever Derek Stevens is drinking and put it on my tab, lads. To commemorate the first leg of the Triple Crown, he’s holding a May 3-4 Sigma Derby tournament. Buy-in starts at $50, so starting emptying your piggy banks for some of the best time-on-device action in Las Vegas. To the winner goes $2,500, with varying levels of consolation prize, down to $100 for the sixth through 10th-place finishers. D owner Stevens is also splitting $10K among all punters who bet on the winning horse in the Kentucky Derby. Still not good enough to draw your business? How about $6 mint juleps during the race? Stevens has proven yet again that the Joe Sixpack player in Downtown has no better friend among casino owners.

Now for something really stupid … PHL Local Gaming, a completely inexperienced, outmatched competitor for the last Philadelphia casino license pulled out its deal breaker. And it’s — a quartet of evergreens. Wow! I am so impressed. (Not.) The conifers are symbolic of a “Special Services District” that would extend from Seventh Street to I-95. PHL executives like to make the point that they were in South Philly long before bygone Veterans Stadium or either of its successors. Joe Procacci and his partners are promising a “world class” casino-hotel (2,400 slots, 105 tables, five eateries and a 250-room hotel, all for a relatively thrifty $428 million. And it can open six months ahead of anybody else, they say. (Not hard when you aim that low.)

Procacci may have been born on the intersection of Seventh and Pattison Avenue for all I know. What he doesn’t have is casino expertise. Nary a lick of it. The Procaccis made their money in the vegetable trade. Unless and until they get a partner with some bonafide expertise, they’re destined to be tomato cans, hitting the canvas in the early rounds.

I’ve said it privately and often, so I might as well say it here, too. Were MGM Grand Detroit or Red Rock Resort on the Las Vegas Strip, they’d be acclaimed among the finest properties available. Unfortunately, escalating land prices fed gigantic appetites among gaming moguls. Only the biggest, most everything-but-the-kitchen-sink meta-resort would do. Which is how Boyd Gaming forgot itself and embarked upon the madness that was Echelon. Casino industry CEOs chased ROI much as a cat chases its tail. (The cat, however, sometimes catches the tail … therein lay the difference.)

Four Seasons at Mandalay Bay and Mandarin Oriental (below) at CityCenter having been well-received, Caesars Entertainment is getting some skin in the game with Nobu Hotel and Gansevoort Las Vegas. It is typical of Caesars to try and take credit for the phenomenon, which had been tested by Mandalay Resort Group and MGM Resorts International while Gary Loveman was still thinking about theme-park-sized casino developments. Wannabe frat boy Morgans Hotel Group makes a not-so-welcome return to the Las Vegas Strip with Delano Las Vegas (although MGM will be providing the adult supervision Goldman Sachs couldn’t) and then there’s SLS Las Vegas, which I’m convinced will open in boutique fashion, in hopes that Sam Nazarian (who’s gutting the place in earnest) can persuade bankers to fork over the hundreds of millions more that he needs to fill out his grand scheme, while he starts small. That and remember: SLS has never run a Vegas-sized hotel before, so it has a formidable learning curve ahead.

Caesars’ local tribune, Rick Mazer, tries to diss the Delano and SLS brandings on grounds of smallness and service, but Nobu and Gansevoort are/will be in relatively dinky little buildings. Mazer is trying to take an inexorable fact of life and make it sound like a conscious choice. The New York Times doesn’t hold anyone’s feet to the fire but it’s clear that everyone agrees on one positive by-blow of the boutique craze: higher ADRs.

Holy Cow, R.I.P. Yup, somebody finally tore down the place that was more famous for having been a brew pub (and casino) than for being one, during its lifetime. It also deserves a plaque or something to commemorate the “Ivana” condo tower, one of the “failsinos” whose evaporation heralded the downfall of Las Vegas … little did we know it at the time.