Involve, Empower, and Demonstrate - Nikon shoots and scores.

Published 20061004 by Olivier Blanchard | E-mail this post

I'm a Canon shooter, but I have to confess that Nikon just scored some style points with me. Basically, what Nikon did was this: 1) They selected some regular photographers whose photos they found on Flickr. 2) They sent them D80 cameras to play with. 3) They are using some of the photos in their ads. (Brilliant!)

Footnote, they could have just paid for advertising banners, but opted for a much smarter.

Joseph Jaffe's post on Jaffe Juice echoes my sentiment exactly:

* This is CGC (customer generated content) with a purpose. No "do our jobs for us", but rather "meet us halfway"

* Speaking of which, the agency found a great balance here in terms of working with consumers

* This speaks to all 3 new marketing roles for advertising, namely "to involve", "to empower" and "to demonstrate"

* It further speaks to the rise of product (or product as brand). In this campaign, the brand experience is all about the product in action and therefore in context.

Awesome idea from the folks at Nikon (who clearly understand their market and took a huge step towards making prosumer DSLR technology accessible to everyone who likes to take pictures). And great comments from JJ, as usual.