Effetto Venezia

An established summer festival transformed into an inbound tourism brand

Effetto Venezia

From rebranding to communication management, Zaki has for years played a leading role in promoting one of the most attractive and significant events of the Livorno summer season: Effetto Venezia

Skills
Content creation
Digital product design
Front/back end development
Strategic branding

Services
Brand stragegy
Brand design
Content strategy
Content production
UX/UI design
Social media campaign
Community management
Press campaign and outdoor advertising

Year
2016 - Ongoing

Website

From rebranding to communication management, Zaki has for years played a leading role in promoting one of the most attractive and significant events of the Livorno summer season: Effetto Venezia

The main attraction of Effetto Venezia is perhaps the very place that hosts it: the Venezia Nuova district. The ancient heart of Livorno’s historic center, located at the northern tip of the Buontalenti pentagon, built on water during the Medici era by Venetian craftsmen, with its canals, small bridges, and distinctive scalandroni, it still evokes the atmosphere of the lagoon city from which it takes its name.

Among bands of every genre, street performers, and shows in every square and alley, it was precisely the surreal transformation of the district into its festive dimension that inspired us to create the Effetto Venezia brand. A brand drawing inspiration from the abstractionism of Miró—from his ancestral and welcoming language, made of movement and color, infused with influences yet universally understandable, conveying hope and positivity. Values so close to the spirit of Livorno that they led us to take a creative leap which was “magically” embraced by the public.

Today, after more than 35 editions, Effetto Venezia is universally recognized as the true celebration of the Livorno summer season—undoubtedly the most anticipated, heartfelt, and widely attended event.

Website

The client

With the aim of enhancing the Venezia Nuova district, in 1986 the Municipality of Livorno decided to make it the stage for a cultural event bearing its name—an event that today, nearly 40 years later, has become one of the most prominent fixtures of Tuscany’s summer entertainment scene: Effetto Venezia.

Open to all forms of cross-pollination, the festival has embraced a wide range of artistic expressions—from blues to rock, from classical music to opera, from street theatre to socially engaged theatre, from cinema to installations, from literature to visual arts—hosting both renowned figures and emerging artists over the years, always offering performances to the public free of charge.

An entire district turned into a stage for an event that, also thanks to our work, is now an established and recognized brand, attracting an ever-growing audience from across Tuscany and the rest of Italy.

The challenge

We have faced many challenges for Effetto Venezia. Each year—depending on the theme inspiring the event, the program, the featured guests, the artistic directors, or the local administrations that took turns—we continuously reshaped the communication strategy, adapting it, always in line with a consolidated format and brand, to the historical context and the Municipality’s objectives. Not a simple task, yet one that has paid off significantly in terms of recognizability—so much so that today the festival is ready for a further leap in quality, not only in communication.

Goals:

From the very beginning, our main objective was to elevate the brand image of Effetto Venezia. When we took over the event’s communication, its Facebook page—now incorporated into the Visit Livorno brand—had fewer than 1,000 followers. Through our work, we grew it to 70,000, making it the 3rd most well-known festival in Tuscany after the Lucca Summer Festival and Pistoia Blues.

The solutions

The development of a communication format aligned with the brand design and the production of contents of a higher quality than the standards typically associated with “local” events were the two key pillars on which we based the design and communication strategies aimed at elevating the brand image of Effetto Venezia. We therefore placed brand recognizability and identity at the forefront. Over the years, the various communication tools have adapted to the needs and circumstances of an ever-evolving territory, while always maintaining strong overall consistency.

Below is a summary of the activities carried out over the years:

Event brand design.
Definition of the brand strategy and content strategy.
Creation of all textual, photographic, and video contents.
Design, management, and updating of the website and all digital tools.
Production of editorial plans and management of social channels.
Design and management of social campaigns.
Design and production of all offline and online communication tools and materials.
Organization and management of the editorial team and press office activities.
Design and management of outdoor advertising as outlined in the media plan.