With new sign, Aria shows impact still defined by size, flash

By Conor Shine

Thursday, March 29, 2012 | 2 a.m.

It’s one of the great paradoxes in Vegas marketing: There’s no missing the Strip, arguably the most architecturally fanciful, visually over-the-top, three-mile stretch of highway in the country.

But by the same token, with so much to see — The resorts! The volcano! The dancing fountains! The pirates! The sphinx! The gondolas! The Eiffel Towerette! The Statuette of Liberty! The oversized Coke bottles and giant M&Ms! All those Buzz Lightyears and Garfields looking for handouts! Towering video billboards pulsating with the names of headliners and DJs and 10x odds! — woe be the hotel that goes unnoticed because its own signage — either alongside the Strip or fronting Interstate 15 — is, well, just too wimpy.

For Aria, one of the Strip’s newest resorts, its sign erected along I-15 less than three years ago proved too small and has been replaced with a much larger one.

Grabbing the attention of the millions of motorists driving by on I-15 each year is crucial, and the old sign was not accomplishing that goal, Yvette Monet, an MGM Resorts International spokeswoman, said in an email. MGM Resorts owns Aria.

The new Aria sign measures 64 feet wide by 36 feet high, compared with the 46-by-26 sign it replaced.

Motorists approaching the Strip on northbound I-15 can spot the new sign as far away as Blue Diamond Road, nearly three miles south of Aria, Monet said. They will see the Aria logo, which was left off the old sign.

The Aria’s decision to go bigger is in line with a broader trend along the Strip, where casinos are rolling out larger, flashier signs in an attempt to get customers’ attention, said Tony Henthorne, an associate dean at the Harrah Hotel College at UNLV.

“It’s almost out of necessity,” Henthorne said. “Small signs, like small anything else, get overlooked. The big, flashy signs, people notice those.”

Henthorne said a good sign conveys excitement about a property and gives a sense of what goes on inside the casino. Signs with lots of movement and large graphics have a better chance of grabbing a person’s attention and luring them inside, he said.

“Just having a big sign doesn’t do you a lot of good,” he said. “It’s important that the signs convey the rest of the marketing message and that they’re not just operating in a vacuum.”

In the early days of Las Vegas, casino signs were often the only way to make a property stand out because their exteriors often looked similar, said Danielle Kelly, executive director of the Neon Museum, which serves as a final resting place for many of the classic signs from Las Vegas’ past.

“What defined a place was its sign, and that’s deeply embedded in the psychology of Las Vegas,” she said. “These buildings that were a little nondescript, the sign captured the imagination or identified the theme of the place.”

Kelly said the role of signage changed as casinos began incorporating the theme into the physical structure of the building, like at the pyramid-shaped Luxor or the castle-shaped Excalibur.

“Now,” she said, “the building and the signs are working together.”