Cerveza Poker with DDB: Lighting a House Party That Never Happened

A Poker beer campaign with DDB, built inside a Bogotá house — tinsel curtains, a record player, card games and six friends. How to light a party set so it reads as a room somebody actually lives in.

Beer advertising in Colombia is a crowded category with a very short list of things it is allowed to be about: friends, a room, and the hour of the evening when nobody has anywhere else to be. Everyone shoots the same brief. The whole job is execution.

DDB brought me in for Poker, and we built the entire campaign inside one house in Bogotá.

Warm, and then warmer

The single decision that carries this set is colour temperature. Everything is warm — practical lamps left in shot, a paper lantern, a gold tinsel curtain across the back wall, red drapes — and then the key light was pushed warmer still. Nothing in the frame is neutral.

That is not how you would light a product. It is how the room would actually look at nine in the evening with the overheads off, and it does something no amount of styling achieves: it makes the viewer feel like they arrived late rather than like they are being shown something.

Six people, one focal length

Group shots fail when the photographer keeps changing position and the crowd re-forms into a line for each frame. So we set the table, gave everyone a real game to play, and I worked mostly from two positions with one lens — into the group across the table, and from behind a shoulder so the foreground body frames the rest.

The frame that ran hardest is the one with a bottle held into the near foreground and five laughing people dissolved behind it. The product is enormous, completely soft and unmissable, and it does not interrupt the scene at all. That is the compromise the category is always looking for.

“Make the viewer feel they arrived late, rather than that they are being shown something.”

Give people something to do with their hands

Cards. That is the trick, and it is not subtle. The moment you put a real game in front of six people they stop performing enjoyment and start competing, which looks identical on camera and is far easier to sustain across a nine-hour day.

I used the same device on the Club Colombia work with Fonseca — hand people an instrument, a game, a task, then photograph the by-product.

Where it sits in the beer work

I have now shot a fair proportion of Colombia's brewery output: Águila on the coast in Cartagena, Andina across the highlands, and Poker here indoors in Bogotá.

They divide neatly by geography and light. The coast is exteriors, midday, blue and salt. The highlands are grey skies and green. Bogotá at night is lamps and wood and everybody indoors because it is cold. Three brands, three completely different visual arguments about the same product.