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MGM Resorts and Bellagio Bet on Transformation With It's Time
MGM Resorts and Bellagio launched 'It's Time' in July 2021, a film-led campaign created by McCann New York that positions the Las Vegas hospitality experience not as a return to pre-pandemic life but as a leap into something categorically richer — a declaration, across television, streaming, and out-of-home media in the United States, that ordinary normalcy is an insufficient ambition.
The campaign arrives at a precise cultural inflection point. Through the first half of 2021, case numbers in the United States were declining and vaccination rates rising, yet consumer confidence in leisure and travel remained fragile. MGM Resorts, operating as what it describes as a brand that exists to entertain the human race, used that fragility as creative raw material. Rather than reassuring audiences that it was safe to return, the brand issued a more galvanising proposition: that returning to mere normalcy would itself be a failure of imagination. The campaign encompasses three media assets, including a primary thirty-second spot featuring actor-comedian Nichole Sakura, alongside multiple shorter social films, one of which centres exclusively on the Bellagio property under the title 'Find Joy in the Beauty of Bellagio.'
The Bellagio execution captures the specific emotional register that the broader MGM Resorts campaign promises. Its narrative logic rests on joyful, magical encounters — the iconic Bellagio fountains appearing to mirror a visitor's movements, an older couple reimagining themselves as young lovers — encoding the hospitality and leisure proposition in sensory, cinematic terms rather than promotional ones. Distributed across television, Hulu, Roku, online video, social platforms, out-of-home, and print, the campaign reaches leisure and tourism audiences in the United States through every significant media environment available in mid-2021. Clapboard rates the campaign 64 out of 100, reflecting its strong emotional architecture and clear strategic positioning against a competitive hospitality and recreation landscape.
MGM Resorts identified a tension at the heart of post-pandemic consumer psychology in the United States. The desire to travel and seek leisure experiences had been suppressed for more than a year, and the instinct upon reopening was to celebrate the mere restoration of access — to treat normal as an achievement. McCann New York's strategic insight was that this instinct, while understandable, was also a creative and commercial missed opportunity. The campaign's thesis is not that MGM Resorts is open again; it is that MGM Resorts offers an experience so far beyond ordinary life that framing the return as a restoration of the status quo would actively diminish the brand's core promise of luxury, glamour, romance, and live entertainment at scale.
That positioning has direct competitive relevance in the United States market. Caesars Entertainment, which operates competing Las Vegas Strip properties including Caesars Palace and Paris Las Vegas, pursued its own post-pandemic reactivation through promotional offers and loyalty programme incentives — a tactical, transactional approach. Wynn Resorts similarly emphasised operational readiness and safety protocols in its 2021 communications. MGM Resorts, by contrast, made no reference to protocols or pricing, choosing instead to operate entirely in the register of aspiration and narrative. This distinction is not merely creative; it reflects a longer-term brand architecture decision rooted in McCann's appointment as MGM Resorts' creative agency of record in November 2015, as reported by Mediapost, and the brand's explicit repositioning from a hospitality and gaming company to a global entertainment brand, documented in the 2018 'Welcome to the Show' campaign reported by Campaign Live.
The United States casino and gaming sector provided the economic backdrop. The global casino market reached an estimated value of approximately $134.9 billion in 2021 and was forecast to reach $159.8 billion by 2026 at a compound annual growth rate of 3.45 percent, according to BusinessWire. Within that recovering market, the premium leisure and hospitality segment — where Bellagio competes — was positioned for outsized rebound as high-net-worth consumers in the United States demonstrated sustained appetite for experiential spending after prolonged restriction.
Sophie and Walker Cole, the brother-and-sister directing team credited professionally as The Coles, directed the Bellagio film 'Find Joy in the Beauty of Bellagio' for production company Sanctuary Content, as documented by LBBOnline. Their approach treats the Bellagio property not as a backdrop but as an active participant in the emotional experience of its guests — the fountains that appear to respond to a visitor's gestures, the visual grammar of an older couple who inhabit the memory of their younger selves. These are not product demonstrations. They are condensed emotional narratives, each running in filmic shorthand that communicates the Bellagio's leisure and romance proposition within a compressed runtime.
Director of photography Daniel Bombell handled the visual execution, as confirmed by LBBOnline. His framing choices emphasise warmth, luminosity, and the physical grandeur of the Bellagio environment without tipping into the glossy unreality that can undercut credibility in hospitality advertising. The photography sustains a tension between spectacle and intimacy — the scale of the fountains and the architecture is present, but the camera consistently returns to human faces and human reactions, anchoring the narrative in felt experience rather than property showcase.
Agency creative leadership at McCann New York was provided by Tom Murphy, Sean Bryan, Caprice Yu, and Josh DiMarcantonio, according to LBBOnline. On the production side, Sanctuary Content's executive producer Kristen Bedard-Johnson and the company's founder and executive producer Preston Lee oversaw the production, also per LBBOnline. The campaign's creative direction as a whole, attributed to The Coles across both the MGM Resorts thirty-second spot and the Bellagio film, maintains tonal consistency between the two executions while allowing each to operate with its own distinct emotional emphasis — the MGM Resorts film leaning into comedic energy through Nichole Sakura's performance, the Bellagio film settling into a quieter, more lyrical register suited to the property's specific identity within the broader MGM Resorts portfolio.
No independently verified performance data for the 'It's Time' campaign — including audience reach figures, conversion metrics, or brand lift statistics — is publicly available from MGM Resorts, McCann New York, or any named third-party measurement source as of the time of writing. The campaign's submitted record, as documented at Clapboard, notes 4,652 views and 26 likes on its archived assets, figures that reflect archival engagement rather than campaign reach. LBBOnline, in its July 2021 coverage, described the campaign as glitzy in positive, descriptive terms, representing the only identified trade press review at launch.
Structural analysis supports a reasonable assessment of effectiveness. The campaign's decision to distribute across television, Hulu, Roku, online video, social platforms, out-of-home, and print in the United States positions it to reach leisure and travel consideration audiences at multiple touchpoints across both passive and active media environments. The thirty-second runtime of the primary MGM Resorts spot is well-calibrated for broadcast and streaming pre-roll contexts, while the Bellagio film's quieter narrative register is suited to the longer attention windows available in online video and social environments. The campaign's avoidance of promotional mechanics — no pricing, no offers, no calls to redemption — is consistent with premium hospitality brand strategy and appropriate for the Bellagio's position in the luxury leisure and tourism segment of the United States market.
MGM Resorts reported its financial recovery trajectory publicly through SEC filings available at Sec Gov, which document the company's revenue performance across its Las Vegas Strip and regional properties during 2021, though those figures reflect enterprise-wide performance rather than any single campaign's contribution. Clapboard rates 'It's Time' at 64 out of 100, a score reflecting the campaign's strong narrative ambition, competent craft, and coherent strategic logic, offset by limited documented evidence of measurable outcome.
'It's Time' is a July 2021 campaign by MGM Resorts and Bellagio, created by McCann New York. It positions Las Vegas hospitality not as a return to pre-pandemic normalcy but as an invitation to pursue transformative luxury experiences, distributed across television, Hulu, Roku, social, out-of-home, and print in the United States.
Sophie and Walker Cole, the brother-and-sister directing duo credited as The Coles, directed the Bellagio film for production company Sanctuary Content. Director of photography Daniel Bombell handled the visual execution. Agency creative leadership was provided by McCann New York's Tom Murphy, Sean Bryan, Caprice Yu, and Josh DiMarcantonio, according to LBBOnline.
McCann New York identified that framing post-pandemic reopening as a restoration of normalcy would undercut MGM Resorts' brand promise. The campaign argued that the moment demanded experiences beyond ordinary life — live entertainment, luxury dining, romance, and glamour — rather than a simple return to pre-pandemic routine in the United States.
McCann was appointed MGM Resorts' creative agency of record in November 2015, as reported by Mediapost. The 2018 'Welcome to the Show' campaign, reported by Campaign Live, explicitly repositioned MGM from a gaming company to a global entertainment brand. 'It's Time' extends that emotional and strategic arc into the post-pandemic leisure and travel context.
Clapboard rates 'It's Time' at 64 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's strong narrative ambition, coherent hospitality and leisure positioning, and competent craft execution by The Coles and McCann New York, offset by the absence of publicly verified performance metrics for the United States market.
MGM Resorts distributed 'It's Time' across television, Hulu, Roku, online video, social platforms, out-of-home, and print in the United States. The multi-channel approach addressed both passive broadcast audiences and active digital leisure and travel consideration environments, supporting the campaign's broad hospitality and tourism reach objectives.
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