4 minute read
I spent my 40th birthday in a plunge pool on the upper deck at Palms Pool. Six hours, five of us, and we never went downstairs once. That was July 31. One week later, on August 7, Palms lit up the Tall Wall with photos of guests having dinner at Scotch 80 Prime and gave it a name: 55 Stories of Fame.
Here’s the short version. If you’re attending a select event at Palms, the resort will photograph you and put your image live on the 272-foot LED wall facing the Strip. It appears to cost nothing. The catch is that Palms hasn’t said which events qualify, how often the activation runs, who’s eligible, or whether it stays free. If you’re the kind of traveler who’d plan a night around this, that last part is the whole ballgame.
What Palms announced about 55 Stories of Fame
55 Stories of Fame debuted August 7 at a Vegas Girl Events dinner inside Scotch 80 Prime, the resort’s steakhouse. Attendees were photographed using what Palms describes only as specially designed photography technology, and their images went up on the tower.
Palms is positioning it as the first physical expression of This is That VEGAS, the brand platform it launched earlier this year with Los Angeles agency BRAINS. That platform already covers a new identity, a hero film, and a marketing campaign. This is the first piece a guest can actually stand inside of.
What Palms did not release is the operational stuff. No event calendar. No eligibility rules. No word on whether this becomes a paid add-on once the novelty wears off. A property that turns 25 this November, sitting a mile and a half off the Strip and competing with Sphere for eyeballs, has an obvious reason to move fast and figure out the details later. That’s my read, anyway, and it’s the read I’d want if I were booking around it.
How big the Palms Tall Wall actually is
The Tall Wall is a mesh LED display about 79 feet wide and just under 272 feet tall, covering roughly 21,488 square feet of the Ivory Tower’s east face. It runs a 25mm pixel pitch across more than three million pixels and is about 50 percent transparent, so guests in the rooms behind it can still see out. It went up as part of the $690 million renovation completed in 2019.
For scale, the Sphere’s Exosphere covers 580,000 square feet and reportedly sells to advertisers at $450,000 per day. That works out to roughly 78 cents per square foot of screen, per day. Apply that rate to the Tall Wall’s 21,488 square feet and you land somewhere around $16,700 a day worth of Las Vegas signage. Palms is giving that to whoever showed up for dinner.
The camera policy makes this more interesting, not less
Palms Pool prohibits professional cameras, video equipment, GoPros, and wearable tech, and every person and bag gets searched on the way in. I shot my entire cabana day on a phone because of it. So the same resort that won’t let me bring a camera to the pool has built its flagship guest experience around photographing people.
I don’t think that’s hypocrisy. It’s a property that’s comfortable with images of its guests when Palms is the one holding the camera, which is a reasonable position for a resort to take and a useful thing to know before you show up with gear.
What I’d tell you if you’re deciding whether to go
Go for the pool. I gave the Palms Pool cabana a nine out of ten, and what earned it wasn’t a screen. It was Jasmine and Elijah reading the table without hovering, a $15 Baja breakfast burrito that outperformed its price, and a plunge pool at the edge of the upper deck that reads like an infinity pool from where you’re sitting.
Thirty seconds of my face on a tower would be a fun photo. The cabana was six hours I’d pay for again.
I’m going back to do Palms properly, the rooms and Scotch 80 Prime included, and if 55 Stories of Fame is running while I’m there I’ll put my face on the thing and tell you whether it’s worth arranging your night around.
