I don't know if I like watching the ads during the Super Bowl most, or if it's the discussions we have the next day *about* the ads that are truly what’s best…

Wait. Isn’t that the same start as my previous blog article? Not exactly, but pretty much. How annoying, boring, and uninteresting of me, right? Why would I do that? Well, I repeated my previous intro to make a point about the danger of doing that exact thing with your advertising messages. Overused ads quickly lose their punch. Or worse, simply fade away, disappearring like that loud wallpaper in the hallway. Remember that wallpaper? The first time you saw it, you thought “hey, look at the new wallpaper.” After a few weeks though, you no longer noticed. In fact, you no longer even saw it.

This reminds me of the egg farm located 10 miles from where I grew up. Sometimes I'd drive by it on the way to a neighboring town. Smelled horrible. I mean, horrible! Once, I talked to someone who lived nearby, and when I asked him how he managed to live with that smell, he said, "I don't even notice it anymore. I'm just so used to it." As casino operators, we spend money to produce ads for our casinos to communicate our product/offering to our market. We have this, we have that, come in and enjoy our buffet, join us for a hotel stay. We spend a lot of money to communicate this information, and that communication is important because we are competing against other casinos for market share. Money is on the line.

When you pitch your casino's case, when you ask your audience to, first, listen to your pitch, and then second, act on that pitch, what do you think works better — the same idea every other casino in your market, in all markets, always uses, over and over again: Hey, we're a casino and here are six amenities brochure shots of our slots, tables, buffet, hotel rooms, concert venue, and front entrance; quick-edit cuts set to upbeat music, logo at the end? Or something unexpected, new, fresh; an entirely different way of pitching your casino?

Which idea smells like a giant egg farm that fills your nose with egg farm smell all day, every day, but because it's always there, and always has been there, for 25 years, is a smell you just don't even notice anymore?