Responses by David Register, executive creative director and photographer, Connelly Partners.
Background: Targeting restaurants and their customers, this campaign for Bombazine Oysters takes a deliberate approach to capture the raw, unrefined elegance of oysters. The creative features prominently online and across all of Bombazine Oysters’s collateral materials, from sales packaging to point-of-purchase displays.
Design thinking: Given how visceral the sight of a shucked oyster is and how sensory our copy became, we wanted rigid simplicity with our photography. Using a top-down camera set up on white paper, the eye can only fixate on one thing, making the oysters the hero with all their imperfections.
Challenges: Our goal was to do something very different in the category, and that’s always a challenge. Oyster farms tend to lean into beautiful landscapes, and the romance of aquafarming in the fresh, cold waters of places like Maine.
Favorite details: We love the pure craft of this campaign. It’s a great example of truly ironic insight being brought together by beautiful words, Mike’s gorgeous type, and an honest and noncommercial approach to photography.
Visual influences: The photography of Richard Avedon. I’ve always been in love with his American West portraits. It’s “ugly” captured beautifully. And in a way, that really drove our concept. Interestingly, Clark Shepard, the associate creative director and writer on the campaign, went to the same place with his first few lines, tapping into the oddly unappealing yet delicious aspects of eating oysters.
Specific project demands: There wasn’t a lot of budget on this one, so we didn’t have a proper food stylist on this job. So, we did a lot of shucking and eating to get four oysters that looked just right. It was a labor of love indeed.
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