In 2003, the city itself got in on the deception game when The Las Vegas Visitors and Convention Committee debuted its “What happens here, stays here” ad campaign. Most people know this campaign as, “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” but the point is, most people know it. Not since, Shangri-La or the Vatican has an entire city seen such successful marketing. The ‘What Happens’ campaign centered around a handful of TV commercials promoting explicit lying. Some of these commercials feature men and women telling their friends, unconvincingly, that they came to Las Vegas for the food or for the shows—yeah, for the shows, that’s the ticket. The other ones feature Las Vegas tourists lying to other Las Vegas tourists.

When city advertising executives discuss what makes the ads so successful, they say things like, “The beauty of the ‘What happens here’ campaign is that it means different things to different people. It can mean everything from going to a risqué review show to splurging on a fancy dinner.” That characterization is as deceitful as the ad campaign itself. The “What happens here” ad campaign’s implication is crystal clear: If you come to Las Vegas and gamble away your children’s college fund and cheat on your wife, the city’s tourism board will reaccredit your bank account when you check out of your hotel and fly you home in a time machine so you can un-cheat on your wife and preserve the sanctity of your marriage.

One of these commercial features a guy approaching a dozen women in a dozen different locations on the strip and telling each one of them that the has a different occupation. “I’m a rock star,” “I’m an astrophysicist”—that sort of thing. He tells one woman that he’s a writer and she replies, “You told my friend you were an attorney.” He pauses, and then says, “I am…in the off-season.”

...yeah, nobody believes me when I use that line either. But it's true!