Case study · Azzurro Club Vacanze · Content, creators & social
Hospitality · Content · Creators · Social
Content, creators and the channels
Thirteen properties, one group, and a decision to make every week: what does each hotel publish, and what is it supposed to sell. The content was treated as a product with a job, not as a calendar to fill.
Content strategy: the product and the results
- One positioning per property. A four star family village on the Adriatic and a five star hotel in the Dolomites share an owner and nothing else. Each had its own formats, its own promise and its own season to defend.
- Formats chosen by what they had to do: the room and the pool to answer "where will I sleep", food and experiences to answer "what will we do", staff and events to answer "will I feel welcome".
- Production planned around the season, so the summer offer was shot in spring and the winter campaign had images that were not two years old.
- The result the content was measured on was not engagement: it was whether the direct channel kept growing. Over two years it went from 20% to 70% of online revenue.
Influencer marketing
Talent was used for two different jobs, and keeping them separate is what made the budget work. Creators with a local audience to make a specific property credible in a specific season, and national comedians to give the group reach it could not buy at that price anywhere else.
The brief was always the same: the property is the set, not the sponsor. A piece that could have been filmed anywhere sells nothing, so every collaboration had to use something only that hotel had.
And the fee bought two things at once. The comedian performed live for guests, on the resort stage in summer and in the group's theatres in winter, so the same money paid for entertainment the guests had come for and for the content that travelled far beyond them. That double duty, not the view count, is what made the programme defensible in a budget meeting.
The social channels, and what they returned
Between December 2022 and January 2026 the group's Instagram account published 496 pieces: 258 reels and 238 photo posts, roughly one every two days for three years, across 13 properties and two seasons a year. Over the same period the audience grew by about 8,300 followers on Instagram, 6,109 subscribers on YouTube and 5,000 on Facebook, while TikTok was started from zero and reached 2,404.
And here is the uncomfortable comparison: the audience the group owns, against the reach the comedy programme produced on the same channels.
Show data table
| Channel | Followers gained | Posts published | Views from the programme |
|---|---|---|---|
| +8,300 → 10,300 | 496 | 32,810,205 | |
| YouTube | +6,109 | — | 2,759,817 |
| +5,000 | — | 19,807 | |
| TikTok | 2,404 (from zero) | — | 51,248 |
32.8 million views on Instagram sit next to an account with about 10,000 followers. Reach borrowed from creators and from the algorithm does not turn itself into an owned audience: people watch the comedian, laugh, and scroll on. Treating those views as audience growth would have been the easy mistake; the honest reading is that they were paid media at organic prices, to be judged on bookings, not on followers.
It also explains where effort stopped going. TikTok and Facebook received the same videos and returned roughly 0.2% of the programme's reach, so they stayed a by-product of one upload rather than a channel with its own production. YouTube behaved differently: sporadic, but when a video landed it landed hard, with one piece doing 1.4 million views there against 1.3 million on Instagram.
The videos that travelled
The comedy programme is a case study of its own, so these are the best performing pieces without a comedian in them: ordinary resort content, published in the normal editorial rhythm, between 200,000 and 868,000 views each. They are the proof that the account could travel on its own material, at a fraction of the reach but at a fraction of the cost.