Nikon: Mobilising Instagrammers

How do you get an Instagram community to celebrate the 100th birthday of global camera brand, Nikon? We were challenged to come up with a campaign that would celebrate both Nikon’s products and engage its followers across Europe to create captivating user generated content on Instagram.

We wanted to stay true to the brand’s rich heritage and celebrate its past whilst combining today’s fascination with selfies. We came up with a competition using #LookBackatNikon and asked Nikon enthusiasts to photograph creative reflections that also featured themselves with their Nikon camera.

To kick off the campaign and set the standard, we enlisted the help of nine influential European photographers, who, between the nine of them, had an incredible European reach: over 1.8 million. We meticulously researched them and knew all were Nikon users who regularly took photos of themselves. We wanted them to help promote our competition in a way that felt authentic, so instead of asking them to only announce our competition, we brought them in as paid judges too. They created several examples of what a good entry looked like, and posted them on their channels, raising awareness of the competition and their status as a judge. Using the competition hashtag, we asked our influencers to judge the creative reflections and gave Nikon’s followers a chance to win camera bodies, lenses, and Nikon branded t-shirts.

The campaign was Nikon’s most successful user generated Instagram campaign ever and highlighted the creativity and innovation of those behind the lense to a potential reach of over 6 million Instagrammers across Europe. The competition had over 9,000 mentions of the hashtag, of which over 3,000 were valid entries.

To amplify the activity, we created guidance for the Nikon European Instagram channel including the images from our Instagram influencers and used these images as paid adverts to promote the competition. These generated over 4 million impressions, over 21,000 clicks to the competition landing page on the Nikon website, and a cost per-click rate that was well below Nikon’s average.