Case Study
Entertainment & Destination
Atlantis The Royal opened not with a campaign, but with a global dance record filmed inside the building, two months before a single guest walked through the door.
ATLANTIS THE ROYAL x 10:35 MUSIC VIDEO WITH TIESTO
The minute the resort stops being a luxury hotel and becomes a party. The whole idea lives in one timestamp.
CLIENT: Atlantis The Royal, Dubai, Kerzner International
AGENCY: FP7 McCann, Dubai with Atlantic Records
MY ROLE: Account Director
PERIOD 2022 to 2023 Pre-opening to Grand Reveal
01 · The brief
Launch a building to people who own buildings.
Atlantis The Royal was arriving as the most anticipated hotel opening in the world: 43 storeys, close to 800 rooms, a skybridge, a roster of celebrity chefs, and a Grand Reveal set for January 2023.
The problem was never awareness in the ordinary sense. It was credibility with a very small, very sceptical audience: ultra-high-net-worth travellers and the tastemakers around them who have already stayed everywhere and are immune to a hotel telling them it is luxurious. That audience does not respond to media weight. They respond to what their own culture is already talking about.
We also had a timing problem. The property was not finished. There were no guests, no reviews, no lived-in proof. Everything we could show was construction, marble and empty rooms, and we needed the world to want in before the doors opened.
02 · The idea
Don't buy the culture. Make something the culture wants.
The insight came out of the architecture itself. Atlantis The Royal has two personalities: a daytime resort of pools, marble and quiet money, and a nighttime destination of rooftop bars, restaurants and noise. Somewhere between the two, the building changes character.
When Tiësto was first walked through the plans, he fixed on exactly that duality, the switch from day to night, and turned it into a time. 10:35. The moment the shift happens.
From there the strategy inverted itself. Instead of producing an ad about a hotel, we produced a record that the hotel lives inside. Tiësto on production. Tate McRae, who spent part of her childhood in the Middle East, on vocals. Atlantic Records and Musical Freedom on release. The property as location, and as the reason the song exists.
Nobody has to be persuaded to watch a music video. That was the whole point.
03 · What we built
One record, seven surfaces.
The track. "10:35", Tiësto featuring Tate McRae, written into the sixth single from his album Drive, released 3 November 2022 through Musical Freedom and Atlantic Records.
The video. Shot entirely on property ahead of opening: the Royal Galleria, the marble staircases, the lobby beneath Droplets, the pools, the tower at night, with the Dubai skyline behind it.
The tease. A TikTok filmed at the resort in late October, posted with no explanation. Speculation ran for two weeks before the release.
Broadcast. Video premiere across MTV Live, MTVU and MTV Biggest Pop, plus the Paramount billboards in Times Square.
Owned and social. A dedicated destination page on atlantis.com, behind-the-scenes stills through Getty, and a rollout sequenced to hold attention from single release into the January Grand Reveal.
The long tail. Remix package, album placement on Drive in February 2023, and later licensing into the F1 23 soundtrack. The song kept working long after the launch window closed.
04 · Results
It stopped being marketing and became a hit.
The measure of the idea was never impressions. It was whether people would choose to press play repeatedly, in markets that had no reason to care about a Dubai hotel.
400M+
Streams across platforms
40+
National charts entered
No. 8
UK Official Singles Chart
No. 3
Billboard Hot Dance/Electronic Songs
Beyond the headline numbers: Top 10 in Austria, Belgium, Germany, Hungary and Ireland; Top 20 in Australia, Canada, Denmark, New Zealand and the Netherlands; No. 1 on radio airplay in Estonia and Hungary; entries on the Billboard Hot 100 and Global 200; and gold or platinum certification across more than a dozen markets, including the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Germany, France, Italy and Spain.
For Atlantis The Royal, the effect was that the property entered the conversation as a cultural venue rather than a room rate. By the time the Grand Reveal landed in January 2023, the building was already familiar to an audience that had never seen a single piece of hotel advertising.
"10:35 completely captures the vibe and energy of the hotel."
Tim Kelly, Managing Director, Atlantis Dubai
05 · My role
Account Director, FP7 McCann.
A project like this fails in the seams. There were four organisations in the room: the client, the agency, a global record label and an artist's management, each with a different definition of success, a different legal process and a different clock.
OWNED
Client leadership across Kerzner and Atlantis The Royal marketing
Alignment between FP7 McCann, Atlantic Records and artist management
Production planning on a live construction site pre-handover
Scope, budget and commercial governance on the account
PROTECTED
The single idea, resisting the pull to make it look more like an ad
Brand presence in the edit without breaking the music video form
The release sequence from tease through premiere to Grand Reveal
Approvals across markets, legal, label and rights holders
06 · Why it matters
The playbook it left behind.
"10:35" became a reference point for how destinations enter culture rather than interrupt it. Atlantis The Royal's wider launch work went on to be studied internationally as a case in marketing to ultra-high-net-worth audiences, and this record was the piece that arrived first.
The transferable lesson is not "hire a DJ". It is that a destination has an idea inside it before it has a campaign. Ours was a timestamp. The job of the work was to find it, protect it, and put it somewhere people already choose to spend their attention.
It is the same principle behind everything RB Global builds today across the Gulf to Africa corridor: earn the audience, don't rent them.
CREDITS
Client: Atlantis The Royal, Dubai · Kerzner International
Agency and partners: FP7 McCann Dubai · Atlantic Records · Musical Freedom
Artists: Tiësto · Tate McRae
Got a launch with no proof yet?
That's the hardest brief there is, and it's the one we like most. Thirty minutes, no pitch. We'll tell you where the idea actually lives.
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