When your first job out of college is with Circus Circus, the garish, aggressively pink Las Vegas casino/ hotel fronted by a giant neon clown, it helps to have a sense of humor. Miles Nebeker, a creative director at Las Vegas-headquartered Dunn Reber Glenn Marz (DRGM) and a former publicist for the casino, does indeed like to crack a joke or two, or three.
"Where does one go from here?" he muses, rolling over in his mind a life lived in Reno and Las Vegas. "To get a beer?"
But more importantly, he’s in touch with his talents: Since Circus Circus, he’s been creating innovative, standout work in a desert town long on gambling and short on advertising stars. Along the way, he says, he had some shaping up to do: "I was the wacky creative guy people didn’t always take seriously."
Nebeker, Reno-born and reared-with a childhood "as normal as you can have in Nevada"-does more than play the part. He’s helped create a wide range of spotwork, from the elegant docu-styled "We Fix Your Life" campaign for University Medical Center in Las Vegas, to the slick comedy of "Elwood’s Vacation" for the Visa Las Vegas card, created in affiliation with First U.S.A. in Boston and featuring a group of fun-lovin’ Elvis impersonators (directed by Gary Weis of Santa Monica-based Cognito Films). He’s also helped elevate the lowball world of casino advertising to high-rolling heights. Recent work includes the special-effects driven "Oasis" for Mandalay Bay-Nebeker’s first national spot-that features a plethora of waves designed to highlight the casino/hotel’s manmade bay, beach and wave pool. DRGM worked on the spot with Boston-based Olive Jar Studios under the creative direction of Olive Jar’s Fred MacDonald. The live-action sequences were "guest" directed by John Lindauer, who worked on the spots independently of Culver City, Calif.-based Pavlov Productions, which represents him.
"This city is so audacious," Nebeker says, still surprised by his surreal surroundings. "I mean, a bay in the middle of the Mojave desert?"
While he says they’d love to get more national accounts, DRGM has, in part, been branded through association as "the tits and glitter guys," says Nebeker. But if national work doesn’t flood in, flexing their muscles with quality regional accounts is just as good. The University Medical Center work, he notes, is one such example.
"[UMC] has been one of our best clients," says Nebeker of the seven :30 spots. "Our premise is, they fix your life if it’s broken. But that can get maudlin and hokey, so we try to back off from that and tell the story, make it emotional without making them cringe with that Sally Struthers, big-eyed kids thing. We make it compelling."
"Oh Baby," directed by Barry Young of Santa Monica-based Trail Head, and currently airing, takes place in a delivery room at the hospital. Like the other spots in the campaign, it focus on a life-altering moment. "It can be trite to do a birth," says Nebeker, "but it’s so big, so universal, that you have to attack it."
The biggest challenge, he explains, was finding the right actress to play the new mother. (The doctors and nurses were from the hospital, and the baby had been born there an hour before the shoot.) "We had trouble casting non-union and finding the right face," explains Nebeker, "but then Barry found her pretty much on his own. She had a wonderful, dewy look. We flew her in, and she was great."
Nebeker remained heavily involved through post, which meant going to Santa Monica to the Trail Head office, where in-house offline editor Patrick Fraser worked on the spot with Nebeker and DRGM’s senior copywriter Bernice Bamburak. "It was a tough edit," says Nebeker. "Barry was being experimental and we were going in two different directions. But we ended up with a damn powerful spot."
Smart Stuff
Nebeker has been with DRGM since ’93, coming aboard from Reno-based Bayer Brown Forsythe & Ernaut, where he’d been a copywriter since leaving Circus Circus. "When I came from Reno I was pretty intimidated … the guys [at DRGM at the time] were from big markets and big shops. But I came to realize they aren’t any smarter than me, and maybe," he adds with a laugh, "I’m a little smarter."
DRGM, which also has an office in Reno-some 35 staffers in each-is looking at about $50 million in billings this year, according to Nebeker. They work with directors mostly from the West Coast.
"People know us now, we’re on the circuit," he says, "but we’ll always be dependent on reps because of where we are." He adds that because their budgets "are typically smaller than in L.A., and we have to work non-union all the time," they usually link with directors "who have an opening in their schedules and who like the boards, or ‘up and comers’ who like the boards."
While Nebeker notes that they do more broadcast work than any other Nevada agency, it represents just about a third of the overall work they do. "We have a lot of casino clients, obviously," he explains, "and they’re collateral-intensive. But we push broadcast, and recommend it as the best medium for branding."
The casinos, Nebeker adds, are catching on. He explains that while casinos revolve around "instant gratification, they don’t think past what the weekend win is," the strip is getting so crowded with theme resorts, "that they’ve wised up to making themselves more dramatic and appealing."
The difficult part, he notes, is that there is always, in the casino world, a crisis du jour: "We get screaming emergencies two, three times a day. We’ve had clients, two days before Thanksgiving, say, ‘Holy shit, we need a Thanksgiving ad.’ They aren’t very organized. It’s hard to sort of raise your head out of the muck and look out at the horizon and get the big picture. But we think that’s what separates us from other Nevada agencies; we can do the daily emergencies, and know how to maintain your brand."b
