In August 2014 the Russian government imposed an embargo on products from the Europe Union.

Don Giulio Salumeria is a small Italian grocery store placed in Moscow, which sells only genuine Italian products. Though consumer demand was not very high, at that time it fell to the minimum level. People do not believe that in Russia you can buy genuine Italian products.

We have changed the face recognition technology, so that it was able to determine police badges and patches «police». Then we equipped with this technology an ordinary city-format banner , located 250 meters away from the building of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia. City-format was almost 2 weeks on the air, in which we have managed to shoot a video. Afterwards we have posted the video online and in a week many people found out about Don Giulio.

This was one of the main topics of discussions in Russian blogs, a bit later the news were picked up by the press and TV channels. News spread far beyond of Russia. One website even sent a request to the Federal Antimonopoly service and to Moscow government, regarding legitimacy of such advertising. An official reply was ".. the law does not prohibit to hide ads neither from the police nor from the cleaners».

Government has no questions because all products in the Don Giulio store were bought before embargo was imposed. Finally website traffic of online orders of Don Giulio has grown in 20 times.

After we posted the video online, the reaction for it was almost instantaneous.

Once a resource was published by the first large online edition, in two days the video gained more than 100 000 views. But it was not “picked up” by offline media, which initially confused us. However, once the article about the video appeared in Fortune and BBC wrote about it on its website, the Russian media has not kept itself waiting long.

News about our city-format hit the main Russian opposition media – the largest Newspapers and a TV channel.

The next day Giulio woke up famous. 4 TV channels were lined up to interview him, one of which is Federal(Russia 24), two radio stations, a major American Internet channel( "Voice of America") and the Polish TV channel TVN. And we believe that this is only the beginning.

First time in the history of its existing, "Don Giulio Salumeria" have received hundreds of phone calls and SMS with dozens of questions, like "Do you still exist?" and "Can i still buy my prosciutto?" from loyal customers.

People, who've never heard about Don Giulio Salumeria before, formed long lines, forcing us to order more than a ton of an additional package of Italian cheeses.

Talking about "bad" results - we got more than 20 police officers as visitors.

They've bought not so much: about 2 kilos of prosciutto and 3 kilos of parmigiano.

The "Afisha" magazine(one of the most respected entertainment media) published the story about our grocery, headlined "Don Giulio, about forbidden delicacies e.t.c ".

The "NTV" - one of Russian federal TV-channels also made a story about us.

Our main outcome - we're not only still alive, but just opened "La scarpetta" restaurant and you're highly welcome:)