THE CASE IN MORE DETAIL

Dubai Corporation for Tourism and Commerce Marketing (DCTCM) wanted to promote the city of Dubai as a holiday destination to a global travel audience. They also wanted to address the perception of what a holiday there would be like for families, friends and couples through the activities and amenities in and around the city.

Through insights and analytics we could see our audience doesn’t tend to consume traditional advertising. So we needed to take a completely new approach and ensure Dubai featured in, or was associated with, content audiences want to watch.

Key Objectives:

• Drive awareness of Dubai as a destination

• Promote appeal of Dubai as a destination

• Increase consideration of Dubai as a destination

• KPIs metrics: 25 Million Views & 250K Social engagements

Objectives & Insights

Anchor 1

STRATEGY

Our strategic approach was to engage our audience through entertaining content that they would seek out organically and want to consume, through owned, shared and earned touch-points, leveraging paid media only to boost content at key moments. As this campaign needed to appeal to a global travel audience, across multiple demographics, we chose the powerful universal language of music to tell our story. We know music videos are the most consumed content on YouTube, making up 84% of content consumed on the channel.

We needed to identify and work with a band who have global appeal, aligned with our values, shared our creative vision and whose audience was a match with our target consumer. Imagine Dragons was the ideal fit for our campaign.

We aligned our creative and distribution approaches to capitalise on the natural life cycle of a music video and album release, in the most authentic way. We did this through organic alignment with the band’s natural promotional period for their new album, which

featured Dubai in their new music video ‘Thunder’. We leveraged Imagine Dragons as impactful Influencers within the global music passion point, with all content being posted by the band, on their channels. Our brand message was present in the initial build-up

and excitement prior to the new album and single release, during touring, as well as post campaign, with additional content from the band enjoying Dubai.

In this way, Dubai was seen as ‘cool’ and a natural fit, endorsed by the band direct to their followers for further peer-to-peer recommendation. Our strategy ensured our campaign could have reach and longevity far beyond a normal campaign.

EXECUTION

We selected the band Imagine Dragons as the ideal artists for our collaboration, who had mass global appeal as well as an interest in the city of Dubai. We developed a new approach with ‘Location Placement’, a product placement where the product is a destination. With this approach we could showcase the city and landscape of Dubai as the backdrop for the band’s music video for their new single ‘Thunder’ in a creative and authentic way. The ‘Thunder’ music video was directed by one of the most recognised director in the music industry, Joseph Kahn, which ensured the content not only stood out for its sound, but in its creativity, effects and tone.

As well as the music video, we also captured exclusive behind the scenes content of interviews with the band talking about Dubai, as well as branded content of the band enjoying multiple activities in Dubai. Imagine Dragons taking part in the activities aimed to show the diversity of amenities available there for families, couples and friends alike should they visit, from skiing, to dune buggy racing, to waterparks. The content portrayed Dubai as a diverse and unique travel destination for our global audience.

All content was released without DCTCM (client) branding, by the band on their own channels, to their mass follower base. This allowed the band’s core fans to first engage with, share and promote the content and their friends to then further extend the reach through powerful peer-to-peer engagement in an authentic way.

In this way we leveraged shared and earned media first, with DCTCM then sharing the content on their own channels. We amplified the content at key moments, capitalising on the band’s nomination for an MTV VMA award to extend organic reach and impact even further.

RESULTS

By approaching this campaign in a totally different way to traditional advertising, with content and native placement at the core, we were able to reach a mass audience we could have never afforded to reach in a traditional sense. We were also able to align Dubai with key artists who have huge influence within our passion point and place the city at the heart of popular culture, within content audiences seek out and choose to watch.

Our campaign far exceeded expectations, over-delivering on all KPI’s set by the client and achieving our overall target to boost awareness, consideration and appeal of Dubai as a holiday destination.

Brand results:

The campaign boosted consideration of Dubai as a holiday destination by +22% (and appeal of Dubai by 24%)

Other KPIs:
Reach & awareness - 600 Million views on music video (100% organic), branded content & BTS (50% organic)
3+ million social engagements on our content
Impact: 1600% above target
$20 million worth of earned media