CASE STUDY (Talent Garden): communicating the repositioning of a Digital Skill Academy

THE CLIENT.

Talent Garden is a leading Digital Skill Academy in Europe and founder of a global EdTech group, providing individuals and organizations with the knowledge, space and resources they need to train and update themselves on innovation issues. Since its inception in 2011, the company founded by Davide Dattoli continues to stand out for its diverse and up-to-date educational offerings of courses and masters focused on various areas, including Marketing, Design, Data and Cyber Security, Sustainability, HR & People Management, and Innovation Management. In addition, Talent Garden was one of the first companies to create and spread the culture of co-working, with more than 19 campuses spread across 10 countries and a community of more than 64,000 professionals.

The training offerings are aimed at companies or aspiring industry experts, recent high school graduates, college graduates, professionals and companies, for whom it delivers courses in full-time, part-time, online and in-presence formats and located in major cities across Italy, with a focus on upskilling and knowledge enhancement pathways.

Talent Garden's flagship is its AI Academy, the first in Europe entirely dedicated to paths aimed at supporting the growth of skills on artificial intelligence applied to various educational sectors. The Academy's offerings, ranked among the world's top 100 in Edutech by Time, include nine courses of varying lengths.

THE OBJECTIVES OF THE COLLABORATION

Until 2024, the media narrative on Talent Garden had focused mainly on activities related to co-working. Since September of the same year, the brand has been activating its collaboration with Disclosers with the aim of increasing brand awareness and being identified as Italian excellence and a point of reference in the field of training on innovation issues, the company's true core business, on par with competitors in the educational sector.

The PR strategy also focused on consolidating the role of Talent Garden's leading figures - in addition to the Founder and Chairman David Dattoli, also the Italy CEO Joseph Mayer and Academy Director Sara Bonfioli - with the goal of making them relevant interlocutors and influential voices in the debate on innovation and technology. Senior figures were also joined by members of the community-alumni, faculty, startuppers-to provide concrete testimony on the importance of education in an ever-evolving field.

It started from case studies, testimonials, surveys and unpublished data to tell the story of Talent Garden as an ideal destination for learning the tools needed to face the challenges of the future, able to anticipate the needs of the labor market thanks to a forward-looking vision on emerging trends: not only through training, but also by offering opportunities for continuous updating and promoting the role of the community of professionals and innovators, TAG's authentic hallmark.

THE PR & MEDIA RELATIONS STRATEGY

The PR and press office work started with the construction of a strategy aimed at integrating the information needs of the brand with the needs of the media world. Communication was developed along three main lines:

• Development of corporate and product news, through media-relevant storytelling on Talent Garden's major news-including the launch of new courses and training opportunities, events, co-branding collaborations, and business growth-accompanied by data or scenario analysis. The goal was to make the content appealing to both vertical press on education, jobs, startups and tech, as well as generalist and business titles. In this way, Talent Garden positioned itself not only as a provider of courses, but as an active player in intercepting changes in the labor market.
• Coverage of festivals and theme days, such as Women's Day and World Environment Day, supported by the contributions of faculty, alumni and alumni, as well as startup founders embedded within the Talent Garden community, in order to engage the Academy in the public debate and highlight its successful entrepreneurial realities.
• Newsjacking and active pursuit of editorial opportunities, identified by constantly garrisoning current events with the aim of intercepting hot news and emerging trends, offering comments, interviews and contributions to the press by Talent Garden spokespeople.
• Differentiated positioning of spokespersons, following a logic of specialization by media target. Davide Dattoli has been the reference for business and economics titles, with articles under his own byline in Il Sole 24 Ore and interviews in Economy and La Stampa on AI and labor market issues. Giuseppe Mayer has manned the consumer and news press, with interviews in Today.it and SiamoJedi focused on emerging professions. They were joined by third-party voices - alumni, faculty and community startuppers - to bring concrete testimonials and broaden the audience of the newsrooms involved, including lifestyle and women's newsrooms.
• Enhancement of partnerships as a narrative lever, including initiatives with Microsoft for AI Skills Lab, Google Cloud for Startup School Gen AI, Var Group for Hackathon, TikTok for AI Startup School. These collaborations have been helpful in attracting additional media attention and multiplying coverage. The launch of the AI Skills Lab with Microsoft, for example, generated releases on Sky TG24, ADNKronos, and Repubblica.it. The strategy thus leveraged partners' reputations to gain access to first-tier newsrooms while building Talent Garden's credibility as a reliable interlocutor in the innovation ecosystem.

RESULTS.

In the period between September 2024 and March 2026, the PR and Media Relations activities developed for Talent Garden generated a total of over 260 releases, with distributed coverage in national, vertical and industry titles in tech, education, business and current affairs.

The volume is divided into three distinct phases. In 2024, from the start of the collaboration until December, the activity focused on building initial relationships with editorial offices and coverage of specific events-including the Tech for Humans Hackathon with Var Group and the partnership with Google Cloud-generating 72 issues, 9 of which were in Tier 1 titles. In 2025, coverage reached full extension: 146 total issues, with 85 Tier 1s, confirming a now consolidated positioning. The qualitative peak was concentrated in the first months of the year, driven by the campaign on AI and the professions of the future, which intercepted titles such as Repubblica, Corriere della Sera (via Nuvola), Il Sole 24 Ore, Forbes, Vanity Fair, Donna Moderna and Harvard Business Review Italia. In 2026, with the collaboration still ongoing at the time of this writing, there are already 46 issues, with 8 Tier 1s including Corriere della Sera, Il Messaggero, Capital, Wired and Economy.

The distribution of issues reflects the strategic approach of the collaboration: alternating between corporate content, product launches, newsjacking and editorial occasions related to anniversaries. This approach has made it possible to maintain a regular frequency of publications over time, without concentrating visibility on single peaks, building an ongoing presence that has gradually strengthened Talent Garden's positioning as a reference in the innovation education sector.

VISIBILITY ON TIER 1 WARHEADS AND QUALITATIVE VALUE OF COVERAGE

The presence on Tier 1 titles is the most significant indicator of the narrative repositioning work accomplished during the collaboration. Prior to September 2024, the media narrative on Talent Garden was predominantly confined to the theme of co-working and vertical startup titles. The PR work gradually shifted the center of gravity toward the topics of education, artificial intelligence, and future skills, making the company's spokespeople credible interlocutors for newsrooms with much broader audiences.

Publications in media such as Repubblica, Il Sole 24 Ore, Forbes, La Stampa, Corriere della Sera, Harvard Business Review Italy e Sky TG24 were not achieved through single pitch operations, but through systematic agenda-building work: surveys with unpublished data, articles by spokespeople, newsjacking on hot topics such as the impact of AI on the job market, the gender gap in tech professions, and the future of education. This continuity meant that journalists began independently contacting Talent Garden spokespeople as authoritative sources on these issues.

Also relevant is the presence in international publications such as Techfundingnews.com, where Davide Dattoli spoke twice in 2025 on topics related to the European startup ecosystem and funding, helping to build an international dimension to the story.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

The Talent Garden case illustrates a path of media repositioning built over time through systematic agenda-building and spokesperson management. The starting point-a narrative focused on co-working-was distant from the company's actual core business. The strategy worked on this distance, producing content and editorial opportunities capable of intercepting the most influential publications on the topics Talent Garden presides over: AI, training, labor market, entrepreneurship.

The most significant achievement is not the volume of releases, but the quality of the titles achieved and the progression over time: from almost no on Tier 1 media in 2024, to 85 qualified publications in 2025. This trajectory highlights how the construction of media authority is a cumulative process, in which each release in a flagship media outlet reinforces credibility for subsequent ones.

Equally relevant is the change in the relationship with newsrooms: from predominantly outbound activity - proactive proposal of content and interviews - to a phase in which journalists independently contact Talent Garden spokespersons as qualified sources on AI and training issues. This shift is the most concrete measure of the effectiveness of the work done.