By Reuel Golden

Consol Energy is a coal and natural-gas producer based in Pittsburgh. It has some 8000 employees, but the average age of its workforce is in the mid 50s and so around 1000 employees retire from the company each year. A new print campaign created by local agency Brunner and photographed by another local, Tom Cwenar (whose work was combined with stock from Shutterstock), aims to raise the company's profile and act as a recruitment drive for a younger workforce. In one execution, light coming out of real Consol miners' helmets beams onto all the things that coal powers: suburban homes, trains, ball parks, a fairground and a downtown cityscape. All the elements are merged seamlessly into a dramatic tableau next to copy that says, "America's power starts with us." The extensive retouching--the image is a composite of dozens of different photographs--was done by another local, Dwight Pritchett. "We've become invisible in a sense since the 1950s when people stopped using coal to heat their homes and run the railways, but today about 50 percent of all the electricity that we produce in the States is from coal," explains Thomas Hoffman, senior vice president external affairs at Consol. "But we don't sell it to the public, we sell coal to the power plants and the big interstate pipe companies, so people don't know a lot about us, so this campaign is reintroducing Consol to the public." The other execution is a variation on the same concept, but instead of the light beaming onto different American scenes, it shines onto a cityscape of soaring skyscrapers. Hoffman says casting real Consol employees gives the campaign a real credibility. "We are saying that our employees are important people doing heroic work and so we wanted to portray them as bigger than life. [One of the miners in the posters is called Nate Hercules.] The message is conveyed in simple and powerful terms that 'everything we do starts with energy and we are the guys that are giving you a heck of a lot of that.'" Derek Julin art director at Brunner says that Cwenar was hired because of some beautiful portraits he shot for the Marines that really caught the agency's eye. "He's a very creative guy who always brings something new to the table and he's extremely versatile. For this concept, his versatility was key. Plus, he knows Pittsburgh better than most photographers, and many of the pieces were shot in Pittsburgh." The ads are a mixture of original art shot by Cwenar and stock, for example the fireworks and the amusement park are both from Shutterstock. The postproduction and compositing for the two ads involved a total of 61 images. Pritchett used a high contrast technique to emphasize all the tiny details, like the pores in the miner's faces and the fibers in the clothing. The concept was first presented as a pencil sketch, but when the final ads were presented to Hoffman he was "astounded by how good it was, I just gasped." At the moment, the ads are on view in the lobby of Consol's headquarters. They are also on display poster size on the company's operation sites that are all around the Appalachians including Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and they can also be seen at various technical colleges and universities where the company is hoping to attract new workers. There are also plans to have the ads displayed on vans, billboards and in print. "We are just thrilled with the ads," says Hoffman. "It's created a lot of positive energy within the company and people love looking at all the detail. They want to take a second look and you can't ask for more from an advertising campaign, it's money well spent."