Tease and generate global excitement around the opening of Café Ginori while raising awareness of the partnership between St. Regis Hotels & Resorts and Ginori 1735. By bringing Italian café culture to life through a modern and artful lens, the campaign aims to position Café Ginori as a must-visit destination for both Abu Dhabi locals and travelers to Saadiyat Island. Simultaneously, it seeks to reinforce St. Regis’ reputation as a leader in luxury hospitality, showcasing design-driven, curated collaborations that combine style, sophistication, and a touch of whimsy to create intrigue and elevate the overall brand experience.
As part of St. Regis Hotels & Resorts’ continuing partnership with Ginori 1735, which launched in November of 2024, in 2025 the hotel brand has used social media to highlight and amplify the ongoing global rollout of on-property activations across the portfolio.
In advance of the debut of Café Ginori at The St. Regis Saadiyat Island Resort, Abu Dhabi—an experience blending Italian style and cuisine, St. Regis rituals, and the Art of Gathering—St. Regis wanted to tease the opening and generate excitement globally, while also implementing a social media strategy of creating unexpected, social-first, short form video to support brand partnerships.
To do this, the brand used a unique, visually-arresting, short-form video featuring Ginori 1735 porcelain in an exquisite, striking moment.
Posted to Instagram Reels (the primary video platform in our social media strategy) the video shows three Ginori 1735 teapots held aloft by three hands.
Tea—an important part of Emirati culture and a St. Regis brand ritual—is mystically poured from the top pot, to the middle, to the bottom, and into the teacup.
Unexpected and unquestionably glamorous, the video played into the growing 'surrealism' trend on social media, with audiences so captivated they were asking whether it had been AI-generated (it had not). As an early adopter and pioneer of this aesthetic, the brand set a new benchmark for digital creativity.
The punny caption “tea-sed” the location of our next Café Ginori and encouraged audiences to guess where we might be headed.
The Ginori teapot post became St. Regis’ second top-performing paid asset from 2025, generating 173K paid engagements. Combined with impressive organic-only performance—12.6K organic engagements and 3K organic shares—the video was one of the brand’s most engaging posts on Instagram.
In Q2, the video accounted for 12.1% of total engagements (paid + organic) and 11.9% of total organic engagements, despite representing less than 3% of the quarter’s paid budget, highlighting the strength of its performance.
The paid content also achieved an exceptionally high engagement rate of 40%—more than 4.5x the Marriott Luxury Group average—and a 75% View Through Rate, far exceeding expectations for paid campaigns.
Additionally, tracked attributable revenue from the paid video exceeded its promoted budget by 140%, underlining the campaign’s measurable business impact.
Achieving outstanding metrics, the Ginori 1735 teapots video proves that unexpected visuals and a unique approach to messaging can drive success in hospitality and partnership content.
By going beyond the traditional—such as a typical hotel tea amenity setup, or straightforward opening announcement—and pursuing something bolder and original, Café Ginori at The St. Regis Saadiyat Island Resort became one of the brand’s most-focused-on moments, pushing St. Regis partnerships into the social conversation.
Its whimsical, attention-grabbing art direction and scroll-stopping mystique exemplify the power of elevated visual storytelling, translating into audience engagement and measurable success.