Vegas scores $23M in publicity from naked Prince Harry

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Las Vegas hit the jackpot when photos of Prince Harry in the buff taken in a Sin City hotel room went public. Though the royal rake has yet to recover his dignity from images of his now-infamous game of “strip billiards,” the city’s tourism board has estimated the scandal’s publicity value for Las Vegas at a whopping $23 million. “God bless Prince Harry. He made us a bunch of money,” Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority Chairman Tom Collins said at a meeting earlier this week, according to the Las Vegas Sun. The city rolled the dice on a tourism campaign pegged to the TMZ’s posting of cell phone pictures of Prince Harry cavorting with women in the buff in his $8,000-a-night suite at the Wynn and Encore hotel  “For shame!” read an ad placed by the LVCVA in USA Today just days after the photos were leaked on the Internet in August. “To those who traded in their pledge to their Las Vegas brethren, we deplore you. We are calling on you, the defenders of what happens in Vegas staying in its rightful place — in Vegas. We are asking for a shun on those exploiters of Prince Harry.” Apparently their list of exploiters didn’t include the agency itself. A LVCVA spokeswoman told the Sun that the city can’t measure how much Prince Harry’s scandal has translated into actual new visitors to Las Vegas. What happened in Vegas, though, didn’t just stay in Vegas. The $23 million value is based on estimates on what it would have cost in advertising terms to reach the 154 million people who viewed and read news coverage of their Harry-themed campaign. NYDaily