Hotel La Argentina

TYC Sports was the most watched sports channel during the 2022 World Cup, when Argentina beat France. On that momentous occasion, the country finally added a long-coveted third star to its badge to mark its three-championship wins.

A year later, during the anniversary of the victory, TYC faced a challenge. The rights to air the championship expired and the channel couldn’t run any of the games. So it took the celebration elsewhere—about 200 miles south of Buenos Aires in the small coastal town of San Bernardo.

There you could find a humble establishment called the Argentina Hotel. But unlike the country’s football team, the hotel only had two stars to its name. So TYC went about upgrading the hotel to match its namesake, upgrading mattresses and even giving language lessons to the hotel staff. TYC also brought in new television sets, on which footage of the World Cup win played on loop.

The whole process was “documented” in a comedic mock documentary film that aired on TYC during the anniversary.

Truth Well Told: A seemingly impossible obstacle paved the way for an utterly charming branded entertainment moment that extended into the real world. The film capturing Hotel La Argentina’s road to three stars became the most-watched video in TYC sports history—44.5 million people watched organically—without showing a single shot of the match. Meanwhile, the hotel itself benefited from the three-star upgrade with fans coming from afar to take pictures and book a stay. For the first time in history, the Argentina Hotel was able to hang up a no vacancy sign for the entire summer season.