cibusphoto

The length of a red light

Palermo supermarket chain with its own label, «le Eccellenze di Prezzemolo & Vitale». From 2018 to 2022 we worked with their marketing team on a good number of billboard campaigns and on photographs for the supermarket flyers, social media, the website, catalogues and trade fairs: gelato, fresh cheese, pasta, fruit, wine, cured meats.

Project
Prezzemolo & Vitale
Year
2018–2022
With
Campaigns devised with the Prezzemolo & Vitale marketing team
A fresh cheese as a hot-air balloon over a paper sea, with a cut-out sun, a deckchair, a beach ball and a sail on the horizon

The brief

Four years of work and two ways of looking at food. In 2018, cured meats on the board, with bread and a knife: the product up close, whole and sliced. In 2021, the billboard campaigns, one after another: the 2021 photographs on this page carry seven different dates, from April to September. The ideas came from us and the Prezzemolo & Vitale marketing team, with no agency in between, and the photographs didn't stay in one place: they went on billboards, into the supermarket flyers, onto social media and the website, into catalogues and onto trade-fair stands.

The constraint

A billboard is seen from a car, in the length of a red light. A flyer is seen up close, but there every product gets the space of one box, next to its price; a post on a phone slides away under a thumb. Three different distances, and none of them allows a second look: an image that needs one to be understood is an image lost. For a billboard this means something precise. The photograph can't tell three things, it has to say one, strongly enough to land before the copy, and leave the copy and the logo room to land right after.

How we solved it

Every 2021 campaign stands on a single idea, and the idea is always the product. A scoop of gelato and its cone hang in mid-air above the tub, between two fields of solid colour, light blue above and orange below, and nothing is composited: it is a single shot, with the scoop and the cone hung on fishing line. The scoop isn't gelato but a mock-up we built ourselves, because real gelato under set lights doesn't wait. A fresh cheese becomes a hot-air balloon over a paper sea, with a cut-out sun and a sail on the horizon, and half the frame stays sky, free for the headline. A man in shirt and tie lifts a forkful of spaghetti in front of a wall of pasta. Two hands reach together into a tray of fruit seen from above. These images read even when small, because they rest on shape before detail: the cone, the balloon, the raised arm, the octagon of the tray. And light blue comes back almost everywhere — the gelato's background, the paper sky, the sea behind the catamaran — so campaigns shot months apart look like the same summer. The 2018 photographs speak another language, the language of the cutting board: wood, bread, knife, and the cured meat always cut open, the slices beside the whole piece.

What we delivered

  • 2021: billboard campaigns, from gelato to fresh cheese, from pasta to fruit
  • 2021: summer on a boat, with people, the tray and the sparkling wine
  • 2021: wine bottles on solid-colour backgrounds
  • 2018: cured meats on the board, whole and sliced, with bread
  • Portrait, landscape and panoramic frames

Where the images ended up

  • Billboards
  • Supermarket flyers
  • Social media
  • Website
  • Catalogues
  • Trade fairs
  • A man in shirt and tie lifts a forkful of spaghetti in tomato sauce in front of a wall of shelves stacked with pasta, over a checked tablecloth
  • Tub of «le Eccellenze di Prezzemolo & Vitale» vanilla gelato on an orange surface, with a scoop and a cone suspended above it, on a light-blue background
  • «le Eccellenze di Prezzemolo & Vitale» stracchino made from Italian cow's milk, wrapped and unwrapped on its paper, on a wooden board
  • Six wine bottles lying on a yellow background, crossed by the shadows of palm leaves
  • A couple on the trampoline of a catamaran, at sea off the coast, with a tray of cured meats, cheese and fruit and a bottle of sparkling wine
  • The tray of cured meats, cheese and fruit with the sparkling wine, close up on the catamaran, and behind it a young man laughing
  • Tray of cut fruit seen from above, with strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, redcurrants, kiwi and melon, and two hands reaching in together
  • Cured meat tied with string, cut open on the board with slices in the foreground, bread and a knife
  • A whole piece marked by its net and its cut half, thin slices on the board, bread and a bowl of honey
  • Long, thin salumi on a board, one cut into rounds, with bread and a knife
  • Two pepper-crusted pieces cut in half, one on top of the other on a board: the white and pink of the layers

More work

Back to work

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