The casino conglomerate MGM Mirage pulled off an end run around the NFL’s ban on Las Vegas advertising during Sunday’s Super Bowl thanks to a Kia Motors ad—and the NFL is not pleased.

The football league has long barred Las Vegas from buying ad time in nationally televised games, but it loosened its rules in December to allow commercials for the destination as long as it didn’t show the Strip, casinos, drinking, or sexual activity.

Yet Kia Motors had a one-minute third-quarter spot during the Colts-Saints game in which life-size toys and sock puppets are seen cruising down Las Vegas Boulevard in a Sorento past the Statue of Liberty at the New York-New York resort and then, The Right Stuff-style, power-walking into the Monte Carlo Hotel-Casino. Both are owned by MGM Mirage.

NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy sent this terse email statement to Portfolio.com: “CBS sells the ads that appear in the game. We did not see this ad before it aired. The shots of the casinos did violate our policy, and we have since addressed the matter with CBS.”

A CBS spokeswoman has not yet returned calls or emails for comment.

Here’s the ad:

And here’s the revised policy issued in December by the NFL which, while ostensibly regarding advertising of Vegas as a tourist destination, is all-inclusive regarding any Vegas imagery, per that McCarthy comment:

In all instances the ads should be for tourism destinations only. So TV/radio/Internet/print ads for Las Vegas tourism or Vegas.com will be allowed. Ads for specific hotels or resorts are NOT permitted if they house any type of gambling.

Ads may NOT contain any gambling references—audio or video—or any gambling imagery. So by way of example, an ad for Las Vegas tourism with pictures of slot machines, dice, cards, or a wide shot of Vegas strip and casinos would NOT be OK. However an ad for Las Vegas tourism with pictures of golf, swimming pools, and performers WOULD be OK.

The content of the ads (audio and/or visual) must be “family friendly.” Any suggestive ads or those showing or suggesting inappropriate activity (e.g., alcoholic excess, sexual adventures), or those that imply general misbehavior (e.g., “What happened in Vegas Stays in Vegas”) will not be approved.

The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority declined to take an ad this year, electing instead to spend $1.4 million on other programs in select markets encouraging tourism to Vegas for Super Bowl weekend. That worked; the LVCVA estimated about 280,000 people came for the game, a 13.5 percent uptick from 2009 and vastly more than the estimated 100,000 who went to Miami.

So how did this even come about? Kia Motors and the Monte Carlo, it so happens, share a Los Angeles-based ad agency, David&Goliath. Kia spokesman Jay Joyer said that the agency arranged for the filming of the ad last fall and submitted the commercial two weeks ago for approval. It sailed through without any pushback, Joyer said.

“We were aware of the sensitivity over Las Vegas and gambling and the NFL, but in terms of the creative of the ad, the intention was always to film that part of it in Las Vegas,” Joyer said. “We worked with both New York-New York and the Monte Carlo, as well as with MGM Mirage, to get all the necessarily clearances.”

(Follow all the news about MGM Mirage and thousands of other companies using bizWatch, Portfolio.com's unique aggregation tool.)

At first, it appeared the MGM Mirage may have found a backdoor way of getting itself into the Super Bowl broadcast despite the rules, but spokesman Gordon Absher said the Kia ad “does not represent a new strategy on the part of our company.” Plus, now that a dispute has erupted over it, he stepped out of the ring by saying: “I admire the Sock Monkey's choice of destination, but this still sounds like an issue between the NFL and CBS.”

The anti-Vegas policy for the NFL has a rich history. Media coverage of the league’s refusal to air the first “What Happens Here Stays Here” ads in 2003 actually helped launch the campaign and the slogan. In 2006, the NFL forced NBC not to promote its then-Monday-night soap Las Vegas, and the network went on to move the show to Fridays once it landed Sunday Night Football so it could promote its Monday-night TV lineup without an issue.

The NFL has long maintained that it does not want its brand associated with gambling. That’s never made much sense to Wynn Las Vegas oddsmaker Johnny Avello, who argues that the legal, regulated sports-book industry of Nevada is an important check on illicit activities that might occur in the illegal bookmaking world. About $90 million is wagered each year in Nevada, the only state where sports betting is legal, but the lines set there are printed in newspapers around the world and used by other bettors.

“If it wasn’t for the betting, the NFL’s market share would be reduced by half because people watch games because they have action on them,” Avello said. “The teams are somewhat exciting, but they’re that much more exciting if you have a bet on them.”

For their part, the LVCVA seemed amused.

“In the end, Las Vegas got exposure, and it didn’t cost us a $3 million investment,” LVCVA spokesman Vince Alberta said. “That’s the irony, we had made the decision not to advertise Las Vegas, and there we were.”

No word from the NFL on whether they’ve similarly chastised CBS over all those other ads involving “alcoholic excess [and] sexual adventures” during the game.

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Steve Friess is a freelance writer based in Las Vegas. He writes the blog www.VegasHappensHere.com.