Bimbo, Donuts and Marinela: Five Rooms, Five Colours, One Secret Snack

A gel-lit campaign for Bimbo's Donuts and Marinela shot across five rooms in Bogotá — a car at night, a pink bedroom, a green living room, a blue bathroom. Every frame is somebody eating alone and enjoying it far too much.

The insight behind this Bimbo campaign was simple and slightly wicked: nobody eats a Donut or a Marinela in company. You eat it in the car before you go inside. You eat it in the bathroom. You eat it on the sofa at eleven at night with one sock off. The brief was to photograph that privacy without making it look sad.

The answer was colour. A lot of it.

One room, one gel

Each frame in this campaign is built on a single dominant colour that belongs to the room rather than the product. The bedroom is magenta. The living room is a cold green. The bathroom is deep blue with a curtain lit from behind. The car is night, so it is teal and sodium.

Committing to one colour per set means every image reads instantly at thumbnail size — essential when a campaign is going to live mostly on phones — and the series holds together as a set without repeating a single location or pose.

Overact, slightly

The performances here are pitched deliberately above naturalism. The bite in the car is much too big. The woman on the bed is standing on it, arm out, clothes everywhere. The man on the sofa has surrendered.

This is the one category where I encourage that. Snack advertising is comedy, and comedy needs a bigger gesture than drama does. The trick is that the *rooms* stay honest — real clutter, real posters, a real pile of laundry — so the performance has something truthful to push against.

“The performances can be big as long as the rooms stay honest.”

Set dressing is most of the job

Look at the backgrounds and you will find the actual work: the patterned rug, the specific pink of an attic ceiling, a strip of blue tile, cassette tapes and postcards taped to a wall. Every one of those was chosen and placed, and together they do more characterisation than the casting does.

I lean on this heavily whenever a campaign has to imply a whole life inside a single frame. It is the same construction logic behind the Poker house-party work for DDB, where a room had to feel lived in before anybody walked into it.

Shot in 2021, and it shows

This was made in April 2021, when Bogotá was still moving in and out of restrictions and almost every brand brief in Colombia had quietly become about being at home. Five interiors, small crew, no exteriors, no crowds.

Constraints like that tend to sharpen work rather than dull it. Without the option of going outside, the entire campaign had to be won with colour, casting and set dressing — which is, in the end, what made it look like nothing else in the category that year.