Case Study: Inside Canon’s ‘Eye vs. Eye’ Campaign

When DSLR camera holders were having a crisis of confidence, camera brand Canon, along with the help of MediaCom and Leo Burnett created a campaign to show easy using a new lens could be.

In Australia, the DSLR camera market has been in strong growth for number of years, driven by increased appetite for self-expression and similarly increasing levels of comfort with digital technology. Canon noticed that, while sales of camera kits were strong, the footprint of users with low-to-mid-tier DSLRs who hadn’t upgraded a lens before was huge.

Canon set out to make lens upgrades a truly mass proposition – inspiring ordinary people to take extraordinary images using Canon lenses and making it easy for them to take that step.

The Challenge

The mass-market, entry-level photographers were having a crisis of confidence and self-belief. They owned DSLRs, but doubted whether they were skilled enough to use a new lens and that an upgrade would be worthwhile. Many were sceptical that a different lens could make a real difference.

And, while Canon offers an impressive range of more than 70 lenses to choose from, people needed help to navigate their options, simply.

Communications needed to provide compelling and relatable proof that Canon lenses can improve your self-expression and creativity through photography, no matter your skill level, and make the selection easy.

The Solution

Placing the consumer needs at the heart of the approach, Canon chose to hero four lenses that would help users navigate the vast selection through their very obvious creative benefits: portrait, landscape, sports, and macro.

The creative idea came from the insight that nothing is more compelling than seeing someone you know and relate to overcoming the same challenges you believe yourself to have – ‘if they can do it, so can I’. The approach would be to demonstrate how Canon lenses help people tell their unique stories in their own creative way.

The Eye vs. Eye Content Series

Working with Canon ambassador and musician Guy Sebastian and Canon Master Photographer Graham Monro, Leo Burnett Sydney created ‘Eye vs. Eye’, a content and advertising series putting the two photographers through surprise ‘lens challenges’ and showing how they achieved different perspectives by using different lenses for each challenge.

The Media Strategy

Canon needed a media strategy that allowed flexibility of format, speed to market, could involve the audience and always offer a clear path to purchase. Having identified a number of key trigger points along the purchase cycle, and understood the target audience’s media consumption in the technology category, Mediacom’s strategy was to invest the budget solely in digital.

To get a whole new group of people taking notice of Canon’s lenses and their contribution to Guy’s photography, MediaCom launched the campaign with takeovers on main portals, with large-format display video that did Guy’s images justice. This was followed by keyword targeting through YouTube’s TrueView, along with interest-based Facebook-promoted posts and paid video-seeding with key bloggers.

Beneath everything was a layer of performance media aimed at driving traffic to Canon’s product pages as a step toward conversion. The approach here was to utilise all aspects of performance display including behavioural, keyword and contextual-targeting in a way that employed principles of continuous optimisation.

The communications demonstrated relatable and credible proof of the performance benefits of Canon’s lenses, and ensured these were visible on the mass scale intended.

Integrated through the line for outcomes

Running for six weeks, the media campaign coincided with significant price action by Canon Australia to enable consumers to find value at their local retailers and highly competitive pricing compared with the global market.

Canon also broadened lens distribution to make sure that consumers had the broadest choice of purchase options possible. In addition, Canon’s trade marketing team built and installed ‘lens towers’ in key retail stores to allow shoppers to touch and try the hero lenses together with a DSLR camera. The towers also contained video screens which featured the inspiring Eye v Eye video content.

Together, the creative, media plan, trade activation and commercial plan contributed to increased sales of Canon lenses over the November and December 2013 trading periods.

The video content has achieved nearly 80,000 views to date and continues to grow.

Agencies: Creative execution by Leo Burnett Sydney; media strategy by MediaCom Sydney.