Ferragamo: How to Ski Italian Style with Alberto Tomba

Challenge

Few briefs carry the weight of a century. Ferragamo – a house built on the belief that craft holds value – came to us with this: to make the brand feel alive without losing the timelessness that defines it.

The Winter Olympics were coming to Italy – a cultural moment perfectly aligned with Ferragamo’s heritage – but official rights were off the table. Ferragamo Ambassador Alberto Tomba, Italian legend and Olympic champion, was a non-negotiable at the heart of the brief. And the audience was CNBC’s: intelligent, affluent and globally minded – people who consume premium content with high expectations.

Strategic Solution

Brand:

Entered by:

Without official Olympic rights, the strategy required creativity. The Winter Olympics coming to Italy was a rare cultural platform, one that connected sport, travel, lifestyle and national identity in a single moment. Ferragamo’s heritage sits at exactly that intersection, and Alberto Tomba was the perfect vehicle to bring it to life: an Italian icon whose personality, charisma and history are inseparable from the culture of Ferragamo. Rather than working around the Olympic moment, we built a campaign that lived inside it on our own terms.

The decision to lead with premium video was both creatively and strategically grounded. Research consistently shows that HNWI audiences are among the heaviest consumers of digital video – over-indexing compared to the general population – and that more than 90% research luxury purchases online before buying. In the luxury category, the brands winning with this audience – Hermès, Brunello Cucinelli, Louis Vuitton – are those investing in cinematic, editorial storytelling. For Ferragamo to resonate with CNBC’s audience, the work needed to operate at that level: content that earns attention, reflects the brand’s heritage, and leaves a lasting impression.

CNBC was the natural and strategic partner of choice: the world’s number one business and financial news network, offering a trusted, brand-safe environment with genuine reach among the audiences Ferragamo identified as priorities – high-net-worth individuals, finance decision-makers, luxury shoppers, adventure seekers and international business and leisure travellers.

The strategy combined upper-funnel brand storytelling with lower-funnel activation, building a full-funnel content ecosystem across CNBC.com, Meta and TikTok.

The primary goal was to drive brand awareness and consideration among target audiences in key regions; the secondary goal was to generate qualified lower-funnel response through digital activation, connecting Ferragamo’s Italian identity with a highly relevant cultural moment and translating that story into measurable audience engagement.

Content Solution

“How to Ski Italian Style” is a love letter to Italy, and we shot it like one. With Tomba as our protagonist, we built a world where style isn’t worn, it’s lived. And nobody lives it quite like Ferragamo.

The campaign was structured around three distinct editorial chapters – “The Style”, “The Mountain”, “The Table” – each exploring a different dimension of Italian life. Ferragamo’s products – the red leather glove, the Tramezza shoe among them – were spotlighted through considered camera work, woven into scenes as naturally as they belong to Italian life.

The defining creative choice was to shoot on 16mm – part Wes Anderson’s precision, part Fellini’s romanticism, entirely Ferragamo. For the luxury and lifestyle category, format is never incidental. The grain, warmth and texture of 16mm gave the work a timeless, tactile quality that digital cannot replicate, producing something that felt as carefully made as the products it celebrated. It is a demanding process – development alone takes considerably longer than modern formats – but the commitment was shared from the first conversation. The client understood immediately, and that trust defined the campaign.

What followed was a masterclass in production under pressure. One recce. One day of filming. A resort three hours from Milan airport, deep in the Dolomites, snowbound and shot the week before Christmas, which meant meticulously framing out seasonal decorations to keep the content evergreen. The night before, a full whiteout. The morning of the shoot, the sun began to break through and the light cleared, as if the mountain had decided to cooperate.

With winter light fading by 4pm, the team had five hours to capture everything. Tomba speaks only Italian and worked through a translator on set – a creative constraint that directly shaped the film. Rather than working around the language barrier, we leaned into it: the decision to create a near-silent film, led by music and image rather than dialogue, was born partly from that reality. Some of the best creative decisions are the ones the brief doesn’t anticipate.

We managed wardrobe, location logistics, talent scheduling and a four-asset edit plan simultaneously. The result feels effortless precisely because it wasn’t

The full suite comprised a hero long-form film, three short-form episode films with traffic drivers, platform-native social cut-downs and a dedicated CNBC.com editorial experience, giving the campaign both cinematic depth and the reach to perform across every environment in the plan.

Media/Content Amplification Solution

The campaign was amplified through a paid, full-funnel media strategy designed to surround high-value audiences with Ferragamo’s story across premium editorial, video, display and social environments timed to the Winter Olympics, driving discovery, sustaining attention and converting engagement into measurable action.

CNBC.com served as the central content destination – a trusted, brand-safe editorial environment that elevated the campaign by association, placing Ferragamo alongside content that affluent, internationally minded audiences actively seek out. This was strategically important: Ferragamo was not simply buying reach, but appearing within a premium context associated with business influence, financial confidence and global lifestyle. High-impact display formats – rich media units, branded content cards, branded hero placements, interscrollers and carousel formats – drove audiences from CNBC’s broader digital ecosystem into the content experience.

Across both CNBC.com and social, the campaign was powered by AI-driven optimisation. On-site, AI-optimised ad units adapted creative and copy in real time across mobile and desktop, continuously tuning towards distinct KPIs. On social, AI-powered amplification monitored performance across platforms and dynamically shifted distribution towards the highest-performing assets, ensuring the strongest creative received the greatest investment throughout the campaign’s run. This wasn’t a plan set and left; it was actively improved at every stage.

Video was the engine of the plan. Pre-roll placements gave the hero film high visibility in premium environments and achieved exceptional retention, while shorter cut-downs translated the cinematic idea into formats built for social and mobile-first contexts. Paid social on Meta and TikTok extended the campaign beyond CNBC’s owned environment, with CNBC first-party data used to build lookalike audiences, ensuring reach among consumers who genuinely mirrored Ferragamo’s target profile.

Targeting was built around the segments Ferragamo identified as priorities: high-net-worth individuals, finance decision-makers, luxury shoppers, adventure seekers and business and leisure travellers. The result was a media plan that added effectiveness at every stage of the funnel, from brand discovery and editorial engagement through to qualified lower-funnel conversions across multiple markets.

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Campaign CTR, against a benchmark of 0.34% to 0.38%.

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Exceptionally high video through-rate, proof that the creative held attention.

Italian skiing legend, Alberto Tomba.

Results

The €237k was invested entirely in media, and it was that media partnership with CNBC that unlocked the full branded content production at no additional cost. The amplification strategy was then built to extract maximum value from every element of that investment: premium editorial context, high-impact display, video and paid social working together across the full funnel, each format with a defined role and a measurable contribution.

CNBC.com served as the campaign’s premium home: a trusted environment that gave Ferragamo immediate credibility with an affluent, globally minded audience. Appearing alongside CNBC’s own editorial elevated the branded content by association, placing Ferragamo in a premium environment that reflected the quality of the work.

High-impact display formats drove audiences from across CNBC’s digital ecosystem into the content experience, with branded content cards the standout performer at 0.42% CTR against a 0.34–0.38% benchmark.

Across both CNBC.com and social, AI-driven optimisation ensured media investment was directed towards the highest-performing assets in real time. On-site, AI-optimised ad units adapted creative and copy continuously across mobile and desktop. On social, AI-powered amplification monitored performance across platforms and dynamically shifted budget towards the strongest creative. It meant the €237k was never wasted on underperforming formats.

CNBC pre-roll placed the hero film in a premium environment and achieved a 91.76% video-through rate against a 70% benchmark, proof that the creative held attention as well as reaching it. Shorter cut-downs extended the campaign into social and mobile-first environments on Meta and TikTok, with CNBC first-party data used to build lookalike audiences that closely mirrored Ferragamo’s target profile, maximising relevance without requiring additional spend.

The result was a media plan that generated full-funnel impact from a single focused investment, driving discovery through premium display, sustaining attention through video, and converting engagement into measurable lower-funnel response across six markets.