Episode 11 Part 01
Billboards Bets and a bit of Booze
Discover the expansive career of Nehme Abouzeid, a titan in Las Vegas marketing. In part one, host Jonathan Gudai explores Abouzeid’s impactful journey—from leading marketing strategy and creative direction for the Vegas Golden Knights to his pivotal role as SVP of Sales and Marketing in launching the Sphere.
Transcript
Jonathan Gudai
This world has completely, totally evolved and changed, right?
Nehme Abouzeid
When I got here, it was never Vegas. Every sports commissioner said never Vegas. That quote. Then we are the Golden Knights. We were the one asterisk. The only team in a betting market.
Jonathan Gudai
All right, we’re here with Billboards, Bets and a bit of Booze. This is Jonathan Gudai, your host, and I’m very, very happy to have as a special guest name, Nehme Abouzeid, a Vegas marketing legend. Welcome, welcome.
Nehme Abouzeid
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Jonathan Gudai
So, as you know, you know, Vegas is a place where we want to have fun. And you want to have business. We want to bring people for a hockey game. You also wanna bring people for a convention and a great meal. And we aren’t serving food here today, but we always like to have a tradition of starting off with a roulette wheel to then kick off a drink of something tasty and special, and then kind of get into a little bit of what’s kind of going on in the world of marketing. All right, let’s do it. So you have $100 of chips, four $25 chips that you can place however you want.
Nehme Abouzeid
Okay, great. Yeah. let’s do, a split 11 and 12, because my sports number is 11. My daughter’s sports number is 12. My daughter Layla. She’s a flag football quarterback.
Jonathan Gudai
Oh, nice.
Nehme Abouzeid
So she’s big into that, and she’s on a great team that’s nationally ranked. So let’s do that.
Jonathan Gudai
Wow. Very cool.
Nehme Abouzeid
Let’s do 17 black. Because my daughter Celine turned 17 this last month.
Jonathan Gudai
Oh, so you’re also a girl, dad. A multi-girl dad, like me.
Nehme Abouzeid
Double girl dad. And then, let’s go. Where are we? 19 red. My wife and I’ll be married 19 years.
Jonathan Gudai
Congrats!
Nehme Abouzeid
This October. And, let’s go one more here. Let’s go. Oh, and also because my Celtics are hopefully going to get their 19th banner.
Jonathan Gudai
Oh! That was a heck of a win the other night as well.
Nehme Abouzeid
and then let me see here. Uh, let’s go, let’s go third 12.
Jonathan Gudai
All right. He’s got a nice little diversity there.
Nehme Abouzeid
Yeah, well, you need your payouts, right? So there’s no sense doing even that.
Jonathan Gudai
All right, here we go. Let’s see if your girls bring it home.
Nehme Abouzeid
Oh, no win.
Jonathan Gudai
No win. No win. But there’s never really a losing experience in the city of Las Vegas. And there’s never really a losing experience in this place. So the black box here looks like it is a bourbon. Are you a Bourbon guy?
Nehme Abouzeid
Yeah.
Jonathan Gudai
Comet rising.
Nehme Abouzeid
All right, let’s do it.
Jonathan Gudai
Stellar bourbon. And now this is cask strength. So as you take your first sip, just remember that there was no water or additives or anything. This came straight out of the cask.
Nehme Abouzeid
Wow. You’re loosening me up to tell the truth.
Jonathan Gudai
Here. Here we go. Cheers.
Nehme Abouzeid
Cheers. Thank you. Thanks for having me. This is great.
Jonathan Gudai
Ah. That’s good. So you are bourbon guy or what’s your kind of normal–
Nehme Abouzeid
My friends know me. I’m a notorious nondrinker, but in social situations where there are many. Of course, in Las Vegas and elsewhere, I tend to favor these.
Jonathan Gudai
Okay. The Browns. Nice. Well, like I said, you are a very special guest. You are someone that I have, known through many people in the industry like Jonathan Fine and others locally and, decades in Las Vegas with a really interesting past. So before we start talking about some of the bets and billboards, if you could tell a little bit, tell the audience about your background and highlight a few of the key roles you’ve had in the past.
Nehme Abouzeid
Sure. You know, I’m a transplanted Las Vegan. Like, like a lot of us, grew up in the northeast, went to journalism school, undergrad, and, you know, changed careers quickly. Got my MBA, in ‘03 when I came out here, I was really just passing through town. honestly, but I was on my way back to Los Angeles, where I used to live and I was going to apply for my MBA in the media business because I started out in media. I got recruited by Sands Corporation, Las Vegas Sands, at the time to join them because they were growing. So I didn’t know much about casino, like, casino business. I was more traditionally schooled, but that’s actually the type of person they were looking for at the time.
Jonathan Gudai
Okay.
Nehme Abouzeid
Because they were like, we’re going to open casino resorts in this place called Macau and people called it Macaw back then, which is a bird. You could tell how many people actually knew what Macau really was back then, but they said, we’re going to go public. We’re going to open all these casinos all over Asia. And, I just, you know, I joined and then shortly after I actually met my wife here, who’s a practicing dentist at the time here, who’s also transplanted. She’s from Orange County. And so I kind of got the girl, got the job, and just everything kind of just fell into place. And there are so many times we were going to leave because we’re like, this is just temporary, but just the city kept rolling. But, you know, I was fortunate, like post MBA, I was pretty much right away in the casino business, which was growing by leaps and bounds, and other typical MBA industries like consulting and investment banking were kind of retrenching because it was post 911.
Jonathan Gudai
Right? I remember that was right after the bubble burst, right, with the whole.com boom. So 2001, 2002. Everything kind of went kind of crazy. But, what was it like in Las Vegas Sands Corporation? That’s the Venetian. Yeah And the Palazzo.
Nehme Abouzeid
Yeah at the time. Well, now they sold it recently, but back then, yes, that was the flagship. Palazzo wasn’t even built back then. But yes, Venetian was the flagship and they were winning all these licenses in Asia. They were really punching above their weight at the time. They were, there were not a multi property operator at the time and they were just one property in Vegas. But yeah. They had great visionary leaders and but, but yeah, you know they were looking for generally schooled MBA types, to kind of diversify their own skill set within the casino because you traditionally either had people who checked them in, checked them out of hotel rooms, and you had people that, you know, knew how to deal and run casinos, but you didn’t have people who knew, like, you know, retail or meetings like you didn’t have that all those seven lines of business under one roof at the time, integrated resort wasn’t even a thing, really. The idea of something called an integrated resort. So, and I was young and I was eager and just kind of fell into place. And then, you know, I kind of went from Sands to Wynn eventually. Then I went from Wynn, to be the CMO for CMO of the Golden Knights, which was something I’ve always wanted to kind of do historic things in Vegas. And so I’ve always been attracted to historic projects. From the Golden Knights I started my own consulting firm for four years called Launch Vegas, because I realized launching things in town was, like, formulaic. Had a formula to it. So I was helping other companies, one of which was Madison Square Garden. I was helping them on Sphere, and then I went to Bally Bet as CMO of Bally Bet. At the time, sports betting was going from Nevada only to nationwide, so that was an exciting time. And then, I went from Bally Bet to back to Sphere, but to be an in-house executive as SVP of Sales and Marketing. So we just kicked off Sphere last fall, to great acclaim. And then, this January, I moved on to pursue some entrepreneurial activities because after 20 years of opening billion dollars things on the strip.
Jonathan Gudai
Yeah.
Nehme Abouzeid
I was a little worn down and now I want to apply that to investing in businesses and also building my own businesses.
Jonathan Gudai
Very cool.
Nehme Abouzeid
It was a long time, but I also took a bit of a break, had some fun. I went to Australia.
Jonathan Gudai
Oh nice.
Nehme Abouzeid
Watched some tennis Australian open. I’ve been traveling with my family. My daughter, I mentioned flag football, but, yeah, it’s been about a 20 year odyssey of actually taking sort of the principles that you learn in business school and applying them to an industry that really didn’t have kind of, that decades old infrastructure with casinos, hotel casinos, and also very, license driven and regulation driven. So it’s kind of been learning on the fly and I’ve always like, never tried to be in an ivory tower. I’ve always tried to make the academic side of it with the practical side of it kind of meet in the middle. So that’s always kind of been my, my strength. But yeah, the last seven years I’ve really been focused on launching things, whereas the first 14 were focused on, you know, growing Sands and Wynn brands but it’s been fun. It’s been a fun ride.
Jonathan Gudai
Yeah. I mean, it sounds like, like the 0 to 1 has been a recurring theme in your, in your career. And even with, you know, Venetian, which is the Adelson group and Sands but, you know, billionaires still the notion that you were launching something that I think became vital to their business. Right? China, the Macau market is I remember once meeting Steve Wynn and him telling me that the like, the amount of profits, the amount of revenue and profits coming out of China compared to Las Vegas, it’s orders of magnitude more. And so you did that for Sheldon?
Nehme Abouzeid
Yeah, I worked on all those big Sands. Sands Macau, Venetian Macau, Marina Bay Sands Singapore. Obviously it was massive projects, but it was basically trying to take, you know, the playbook in Vegas and applying it to Asian Vegas. We really cobbled together like an old convention center. A new hotel. There really wasn’t as much of a playbook as you think that was like written down.
Jonathan Gudai
Sure.
Nehme Abouzeid
I made a lot of trips there, trying to navigate cultures and language and, corporate cultures, you know, software that could either do double by character set Chinese, English, you know. There wasn’t a lot of vendors that supported it.
Jonathan Gudai
So interesting. And was your remit at the time marketing specific or did it also tap into other kind of disciplines within business?
Nehme Abouzeid
Yeah, I started out actually. Sands didn’t really have a formal like MBA program. I helped develop it when I was there, but I started out in IT, systems, project management, then diversified into entertainment, booking. so like booking the arena in Macau, booking the venues at The Venetian here. So, I was actually very fortunate that most people spend their whole careers in one discipline, and I’ve, I prided myself from being versatile, and I actually pushed a lot of doors down. It wasn’t easy. It was a lot of luck and right timing, but it was like I got able to be exposed to different revenue centers. So I was like a got an entertainment development, entertainment booking, entertainment marketing. Then that dovetailed into brand marketing and things like that. So, you know, I was just very fortunate at the time because, you know, in this town, a lot of times it’s either like Caesars, MGM, they grew by acquisition. Sands Wynn grew by organic growth. And so there’s really those two, those two different sides of the operators and I always kind of liked and appreciated those companies that were owner led and grew organically. I always thought that was kind of the most fun. Rather than rebranding existing.
Jonathan Gudai
Sure.
Nehme Abouzeid
You know, legacy properties, although I’ve done that too. I just, you know, it was a fun time. It was basically, I call it the seminal growth period for the global gaming industry because it was Macau, Singapore. It was, you know, it was just I think the pace of that development and the amount of money in the ground, well, between ‘04 and like 2011.
Jonathan Gudai
Yeah. Transformational
Nehme Abouzeid
I don’t think that’ll be duplicated any time soon.
Jonathan Gudai
Yeah. Transformational. Yeah. I mean you touched upon in your career a few things that are really close to my heart. I mean, casinos, you know, the family that, you know, that we have, you know, the Epsteins and the Fines where we’ve got big casino background, and then sports. You said Bally Bet. So it’s that sports betting and mobile betting. You know, I do like to dabble in some sports betting. Kind of casually. And then you said Vegas Golden Knights where, you know, obviously I’m a die hard, professional ice hockey fan here. But let’s talk about. So when you went from the, you know, the Sands to the Wynn, but then you transitioned to the Vegas Golden Knights, or was it Bally bet first?
Nehme Abouzeid
No, Knights.
Jonathan Gudai
It was knights. Okay. So, like, how did that happen? How did you get involved with a brand new expansion team for the first real, true kind of major professional sport here in the city? How’d that happen?
Nehme Abouzeid
Yeah. It’s actually a funny story. I was working. I was running brand marketing and advertising and entertainment marketing for Wynn at the time, and the team got announced at an NHL event in a Wynn ballroom. In the summer of ‘16. So I was basically an observer and I was in a suit and I was doing my Wynn activities, and I’m in this ballroom and Gary Bettman is there and they’re announcing the team. Bill Foley’s there, all that. And, you know, they say Vegas has earned the right for the next expansion team over Quebec City. So it’s a big day for the city of Las Vegas. I don’t think people realized at the time how big it was going to be, but I was like, man, if I don’t know if there’s a CMO job for that team, but if there is, I want it. So, you know, I just aggressively went after I went to some events, got introduction to Bill, got introduction to certain people close to Bill. And then over the next few months, there was this little dance because they wanted a real Vegas focused marketer to be their CMO. Most of the other positions were filled with people that came from other sports teams in other cities, and even different sports altogether, because there’s a bit of a sure, definitely a playbook to and a formula to it. You know, being the 31st franchise, in a sport. So, they had all that bench strength. They had the people that knew how to do fan development in Washington DC and elsewhere, what they didn’t have was someone that really knew the city, as well as I did just by virtue of my experience here. And then, you know, the nuances between Henderson Summerlin, like the strip, the non strip. So, you know, I just went after it.
Jonathan Gudai
It’s an interesting kind of question, because you would think that you want to surround yourself with people who’ve done this job of, for, for a hockey team. But then you also think about how unique Las Vegas is. And were you I mean, obviously it’s amazing to pursue that position. But when you finally were like, yes, you can be the CMO of the Vegas Golden Knights. Yes, you can help us launch this. Were you a little scared?
Nehme Abouzeid
I mean, yes, but I didn’t have time to be because it was a breakneck pace. It was like, I believe July they awarded the team. Okay, November. Both the president and myself were hired early November by, I think, November 22nd. We had the unveiling of the name and logo, which they had already scheduled. We need attention to this right away. I was like two weeks on the job and so we thankfully like true Vegas format, right? Whether you’re opening a casino, cutting the ribbon on a restaurant or whatever you rally, right? You work around the clock, you rally. And that’s what I love about the city. And I love like, there’s a social intelligence everybody has. Like, nobody kills you with their education. Nobody kills you with their resume. If you call some, hey, I need this, right, I need full I need $20,000 worth of floral. I need, you know, $30,000 worth of what, a pipe and drape or whatever. People just rally. So, as soon as I was there and we had this date on the calendar, everyone, like our partners at MGM rallied our partners, you know, T-Mobile arena. Like, just everybody came, whether it was, you know, a helicopter company or a promotional goods guy. Everyone just rallied. So, you know, we got what media reports a 7000 people or so to, just come out for the unveiling of a name and a logo. And Gary Bettman told me he’s like, I’ve never seen this many people for just a name and a logo. Yeah. it was funny Adidas, they were the only ones producing merch at the time. So they sent boxes of merch. And we were all worried like the name was going to get out because someone was going to take a picture of a hat. Right?
Jonathan Gudai
Right.
Nehme Abouzeid
Put it on Twitter. It kind of did, but it didn’t go wide. So it was like literally it was well kept, kept under wraps. So, you know, knock on wood. Yeah. people loved it. They embraced the team. It was a great experience for me. My career. It helped diversify, you know, something that had been, you know, heavily casino oriented for a while and then entertainment. But, it was great. I look back on it, I’m still friends with so many people from the team. And, it’s just amazing. And now it’s the blueprint for any expansion team.
Jonathan Gudai
Sure.
Nehme Abouzeid
It’s like “Open like Vegas did”. Yeah. but I really felt.
Jonathan Gudai
Like open like Vegas and go to a Stanley Cup in the first year. Just follow that. Whatever, whatever Nehme did and market the team, and-
Nehme Abouzeid
I had nothing to do on the ice. I had nothing to do with it on the ice. We had some geniuses on the ice, did the draft, and it was something else. It was a fairytale. But I do think, like there was more to the story than just hockey. And I think if I brought one thing to that to the team is, it is the fact that, like, it’s not just a hockey story, it’s the sizzle of Las Vegas combined with the fact that there’s enough of, there’s 2.3 million people here that are proud of their city. And are willing to adopt a new team, especially a homegrown team. And you can see the difference between Raiders loyalty and Golden Knights loyalty. It’s like a transplanted team versus a homegrown team. So, but again, like in 2016, we were doing events, you know, or in early 17 at Desert Breeze Park and 115 degree heat. And there were street hockey, you know, pucks and balls and teaching kids the rules of hockey in the middle of summer. Like, you know, it’s just.
Jonathan Gudai
That kind of plays into that fairytale, that mystique that, you know, it’s 115 degrees and this is an ice hockey sport. like, who would have ever thought? And I mean, I remember when I first moved here, yeah, we were going to the Wynn a lot and Marc Shore. So that, that, that is Steve Wynn’s right hand guy. We were at the Super Bowl party and we’re watching the game. They said, when are we going to get a professional team? I remember him looking at me and saying, it’s never going to happen. Not as long as there’s betting, not as long as there’s the risk that the players are going to get corrupted by it. Yeah. And then you think about all the change I got here in 2010, and that was like maybe 2010 of February. Yeah. and you think about where we are now, the world has changes so much in this year. And, and and you’ve seen it from the betting side, land based. You’ve seen it from the betting side on a mobile app. Obviously sports is kind of, you know, the way that they’ve embraced it. Like I was watching golf this weekend and there were four people on the left hand side talking about it, like young people, middle aged people. So not just like “whispers.” I think I think he’s going to shank this thing or I think he’s going two pod this. And so they were like doing the Talking Heads thing. And below that you had the odds on what this specific player is going to do in that specific hole, encouraging people to bet as they’re watching it.
Nehme Abouzeid
Yep.
Jonathan Gudai
It’s like this world has completely, totally evolved and changed right?
Nehme Abouzeid
When I got here, it was never Vegas. Every sports commissioner said never Vegas. That quote. Then we were the Golden Knights. We were the one asterisk, the only team in a betting market. And then those early days, 2016 passed but hadn’t been overturned. So still, like Nevada is the only legal team in a betting market, be careful. And then we were worried about educating, you know, people in the organization about, you know, betting. But the whole like $60,000 in a gym bag in the parking lot for a player, it’s when you’re paying players 3 million bucks a year. It it’s that it becomes less of a threat. But, if you see the kind of the amazing apparatus that has been built up around online sports betting, integrity firms, you know, all those things since 2017, it’s crazy. I mean, when I was marketing the Wynn Sportsbook, it was a five, you know, 5% margin business. Low margin, single digit margins. You know, our steakhouse, you know, made a ton of money. And then, you know, the betting was just, you know, nice convenience to have an amenity to keep the players from leaving property and then all these non-endemic companies piled in. Well once –
Jonathan Gudai
DraftKings, FanDuel –
Nehme Abouzeid
Yeah. So it’s really interesting. And having worked with Bally Bet and, some companies launch, well, some companies didn’t launch as well. Some companies divested from the business because they realized there’s no, there’s, there’s a tough path to profit there. But yeah, I see both sides of it, actually. I see the purity of the game, which like, hey, don’t don’t make athletes second guess themselves about point spread. But then also year one of the Golden Knights, I remember going to a game against my former hometown Boston Bruins. And I’m hearing people saying, oh, the backup goalies in we should have bet the over because they’re like, oh, they figure the backup goalie is no good. They’re going to bet. And so I saw people like totally engaged from the first minute to the third end of the third period, the final whistle. And I just thought, you know, this is good to grow interest and to keep fans engaged in things.
Jonathan Gudai
I personally believe it’s fun to bet socially with your friends, and as long as it’s controlled and it’s small amounts of money, it makes the game more fun. I don’t agree that Dave and Busters should be allowing people to bet on like skee ball. I don’t know if you read that article that the recently like they’re now letting people bet on all their arcade games at that. I think that’s taking it too far, especially for young kids. But yeah, I mean that we’ve kind of dispelled that myth that, you know, there couldn’t be a healthy professional sports experience. And I want to talk about marketing stuff because when we’re talking about a lot of cool, kind of like parts of your career. But before we do that, we dive into that. I remember it was, the fall of, I think, 2023 taking my wife on a date, at the Venetian. And we cross over on Sands and for the first time, maybe it was July. It was summer. The first time the Sphere had been activated. I remember just like driving, driving. And all of a sudden, this basketball that was like, the craziest thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life just emerges like, that is what this, that, that these guys have been working on. Like it’s, it’s been this black dome, all this potential. But that is unbelievable. So talk about that. How early were you in the Sphere project here, which everyone sure knows. The Sphere now it’s a worldwide famous but massive LED dome that’s right behind the Venetian. How did you get involved in working with those guys?