Behind the Scenes of a Burger Billboard
In honor of National Burger Day, I thought I’d share some of our most famous clients’ burger-eating moments, and a look behind the scenes #BTS of the creation of a co-branded burger billboard for Rock & Brews Restaurant.
Our project started the way most of our projects do, conducting strategy research into the most effective imagery for the location where this billboard was situated. Our client definitely wanted to promote their wide array of 52+ beers on tap, so a partnership with Golden Road Brewing Co. allowed us to feature a well-known local craft brew, along with the high-quality food offerings Rock & Brews are famous for.
Since everyone loves a great burger, we decided their Gastropub would photograph best since it was able to be shown open-faced, and contained all the elements like: double melted Swiss, sunny-side up egg, bacon, and caramelized onions…just to let people know this wasn’t just your average burger!
Photographing for a billboard takes pre-preparation in terms of art direction. You need to allow for placement of your headline copy and location for your logo ahead of time, because the format is a very extended horizontal, that requires a lot of background image in order to focus on your main subject. We did several comps and the client settled on the layout shown above as the final choice. The headline copy for this billboard, and subsequent billboards, were nods to famous song titles to stay true to Rock & Brews core rock and roll branding.
On shoot day, working with both the restaurant chef and the photographer is crucial in terms of timing. The lighting needed to be finalized with a “stand-in” burger and beer before the final was cooked. We assembled each layer of the burger’s ingredients outside of the kitchen to make sure everything looked just right. The lettuce was hand cut with a scissors, the tomato was sprayed with glycerine, to create a highlight of water droplets, and the cheese was melted with a mini chef’s torch….even the bun was hand picked from over 20 samples!
As you can tell from this image, what we could see standing off to the side of the shot in terms of the placement of the elements and how the camera fools your eye was amazing!
We were very happy how the shot turned out and so were our clients! That Rock & Brews location saw a definite increase in Gastropub sales as a result of this marketing effort.
Lastly, as promised…in honor of National Burger day, here are some great burger-eating memories from a couple of our most famous clients!
Enjoy a burger today… or any day, really, it’s certainly one of our go to favorites.
