”Più la conosci, più ti innamori“ (The more you know it, the more you fall in love with it). This is Esselunga’s first large-scale corporate campaign.
A new communication concept and a new by-line, to give a authentic sketch of long, beautiful story waiting to be told. It all started back in 1957, when Esselunga opened the very first supermarket in Italy and today it has become the market leader even for online shopping.
Discovering, learning more, falling in love. We started off imagining opening up Esselunga’s “back shop” doors for the first time, then leading each person by hand into a world of innovation, authenticity and excellence. To show clients something they haven’t yet seen, and for those who are not customers to arouse their curiosity and issue an invitation. So in this way, one discovery after another, we reveal how easy it is to fall in love with Esselunga.
This impressive integrated project was created by Armando Testa. It took 12 days on set, including 5 nights in stores, 7 days spent in Lombardy, Tuscany, Liguria and Emilia Romagna. It will involve all media, with lots of specially conceived contents for the web, social media and mobile including interactive pre-rolls.
The launch is planned for Saturday 14 September on main TV channels with the corporate ad, impressive multi-subject programming planned by Media Italia will also be added.
The brief the agency received was clear, but also a major challenge: what was needed was a format that could describe the many souls of the brand. It is much more than just a supermarket, it is a real “Food Company“ which actually produces many of the products found on the shelves, and quality, authenticity and trust are the fundamentals in every choice they make.
Thanks to this campaign we will be able to describe Esselunga showing all the work done every day: the production of fresh pasta and delicatessen, the kneading and baking of bread in the Esselunga ovens … images that show the care, love and great attention to quality that makes the difference every day.
To make this story even more true and credible, we decided not to use professional actors on the set but rather Esselunga employees, simply documenting the gestures they make every day in their work, using images to communicate their passion, their manual skills and their know-how, without adding anything… Showing the authenticity of the people, the settings and above all of Esselunga products was enough.
This is a Made in Italy success story. That’s why the soundtrack too is the result of a search which ended up with a modern interpretation of one of the most beautiful pieces of Italian musical heritage: “Che cosa c’è” by Gino Paoli.
We also wanted an Italian director with great experience in the world of food and that explains why the Agency chose Ago Panini and Paolo Caimi for photography who endowed each frame with light and elegance.
“What you’ll see is something more than an ad: it’s a real and beautiful story which belongs to all Italians, because Esselunga truly is the first supermarket that opened in Italy, and since then it has undertaken an incredible journey, always paying attention to details and innovation, winning over customers every day, with quality always as its trademark … And it is precisely from a mark that we started, continues Jacopo Morini creator of this campaign: “an” S “made with the highest quality ingredients by the skilled hands of those who work in Esselunga, a simple and evocative gesture, the same as the one made by a kid’s hand on the window of his parents’ car in 1957, when he was looking excitedly at the sign of the first Italian supermarket”.
This campaign is the result of a great team effort, adds Michele Mariani Executive Creative Director, who got all the souls of the Armando Testa Group involved, and we are sure that it will be a wonderful way to describe a leader like Esselunga, indeed a “lovebrand” that getting to know it, is enough … to fall in love.
Credits
Executive Creative Director: Michele Mariani
Creative Director: Jacopo Morini
Creative Director Copy: Michela Sartorio
Creative Team: Barbara Ghiotti – Fabiano Pagliara – Sara Greco
Client Directors: Giovanni Sernia, Laura Alberti
Media Planning: Media Italia
Production Company: BRW
Director: Ago Panini
