So let’s tell a story - Al Pacino signed four –ad deal for Vittoria Coffee on the condition he tells his story!

He never has and he never will. That’s the response Rolando Schirato, sales and marketing manager at Vittoria Coffee and the grandson of the original founder of Australian iconic brand Vittoria Coffee, received when he approached Al Pacino’s management about signing on the Oscar winner to endorse the Australian owned super brand.

Needing to compete against Multinational Nestle who had dropped millions on its George Clooney campaign for Nespresso, and Lavazza who is planning to pay Julia Roberts a cool $1.6 million to flash her smile for the brand, it was important for Vittoria to gain similar celebrity applause and they wanted to something really special for the company’s 50^th anniversary.

Vittoria stuck to it’s guns and six months after the initial knockback, struck a breakthrough when the 70 year old actor agreed to read a brief from the company.

Schirato said he focused on the similarities they shared with Pacino. Vittoria is a family owned company, now in its third generation of family heritage and both families were Italian migrants. Both Pacino’s and Schirato’s families are from Sicilian roots. That fact made Pacino take note and he tried agreed to try the coffee.

Having known the Schirato family personally now for some years I have to add to this story that it is simply impossible not to note the family’s complete passion for their product. It is contagious to just about anyone who meets the family. Les Schirato is known as Australia’s coffee king.

Pacino, a hardcore coffee fanatic, liked the product and as anyone who has seen the ads on television ‘you get that’ when Pacino taps his fingers against the neatly branded Vittoria Coffee cup on screen and simply says, “This is good coffee.” The vocal inflection of sincerity, even for an acclaimed actor is hard to avoid.

What makes this story even more interesting is Pacino signed a four ad deal on the condition that he would develop the scripts himself with the help of Oscar winning director Barry Levison of Diner, Rain Man, Wag the Dog film fame. Pacino wanted to tell the story.

That fitted Vittoria’s ethos generally of avoiding high cost ad agencies and who has built a vast empire by being master of ambush marketing strategies.

The four ads were all filmed in New York’s Greenwich Village in one day complete with four Vittoria Coffee baristas, two coffee carts and five coffee machines all shipped from Australia. The ads went to air in Australian in August 2000 and the results were staggering.

Vittoria Coffee sales reached an all time high by late August (a 20% boost) and the company secured a 67.3% share of the $137-million market in Australia.

Vittoria says whilst the peaked sales were great it was really about brand recognition. The campaign delivered worldwide recognition. On the drawing board are plans for the company to push into the US. They already do a small amount of business there.

Vittoria Coffee’s campaign further used publicity to tell the story of how they came to get Pacino and what happened when he came on set. You can’t make those stories up, they develop naturally.

Not bad for a corporate success story of David and Goliath in business. It’s also a story of family values, of heritage and of a father’s pride in son’s achievements.