Commissioned Project. Through my client Aduro Comms, I was approached to produce a range of complex content for the well-established wine brand, Cono Sur. A long-standing vineyard with great credentials (including but not limited to flexing a B-Corp status), undergoing a marketing resurgence alongside a packaging refresh. This content needed to tick all the boxes, because included in the agreement were global usage rights!
It’s an interesting new area for me to operate in; a more premium product type but at the lower end price-wise (we’re talking £6-ish a bottle) and a client hoping to attract both the twenty-somethings new to exploring wine palettes as well as the more experienced consumers who know their Cabernets from their Chiantis. Taking this into account, my overall direction was clear; the environments I needed to portray in the content needed to be aspirational but achievable, to attract audiences to the lifestyle without making it appear beyond reasonable means.
You can look at content featuring vineyards sprawling over rolling hills drenched in Chilean sun all day long, but you can’t get to it. OK, some people might be able to, but I’d bet my favourite camera lens that you aren’t going to bump into those people at the wine aisle in Morrisons on a Tuesday evening. However, the average wine drinker CAN chill a bottle of white wine, set up some quirky lawn furniture (available on Amazon for next day delivery, plug plug plug) and pick up some olives to snack on while you decompress at the end of a long day. Aspirational, but achievable.
Usually I operate alone, but I jump at the chance to bring in collaborators. In this case, I knew I needed someone to take the lead on product styling. And luck would have it that a prop stylist had slid into my DMs not a week before this brief hit my desk, and I decided to take a shot with a new collaborator: Georgina Isaac. And a great choice it turned out to be, Georgina and I have collaborated on multiple projects since, and she’s now my go-to.
This kind of situation serves as a really important lesson for my process, and I’ve written about my experience with energy levels and how they affect my creative outputs at length here.
This collaboration allowed me to take a hand off researching and sourcing props for the shoot, which is usually a considerable drain on not only my energy, but my time and budgets. It also drastically improved the quality of the props too, because more time was spent researching. As it turns out, a full time prop stylist has more tricks up their sleeve than resorting to ordering everything from Amazon Prime at the last moment.
