Canon: Working with Yahoo to engage budding photographers

At C21Media’s Propaganda Factory conference at BAFTA, Krane Jeffery explained how Yahoo Studio, which he runs, is building a strong content marketing proposition. Yahoo News is the world’s largest digital publisher, and in the UK alone reaches 28 million people a month. With this reach, and its content expertise,

The Brief

Yahoo Studio was asked by the CEO of Canon to accomplish the following brief:

1. Demystify digital photography for the audience who feel limited by their photography skill
2. Encourage owners of cheap digital cameras to upgrade to more professional equipment

Clearly, this two-strand brief was suited to a educational content strategy. By building Canon a content proposition that engaged photographers at their current skill level, and taught them how to get better at their hobby, Canon would build trust and authority with its audience, and encourage higher value purchases.

Yahoo presenting Canon case study at BAFTA

The Execution

Yahoo built a news channel, which was delivered to 8 markets, with quality guides, how-tos, and photography tips, as well as examples of great photography and expert columns. The Yahoo-owned property, Flickr, already had several large groups of Canon-owners, and these were engaged as a seed audience. A photography competition was run across both properties, with the output being a very popular photo gallery on Yahoo, which managed a voting system. The prize was a Safari Photography Tour with an expert photographer on hand to give advice. The winner wrote about his experience, and this (with the associated photos) was the culmination of the campaign.

The results

The results significantly out-performed the planned KPIs. By the end of the three month campaign, they had acheived:

1. 2.7 million visits
2. 2.3 million unique users
3. 80 thousand photo uploads
4. 9.5 thousand newsletter signups

So in campaign terms, a great success, and hopefully the work also resulted in increased sales and loyalty, as customers deepened their relationship with Canon.