Launching the new Panasonic Lumix
staging a street exhibition
Overview
Taylor Herring worked closely with digital agency AKQA to launch Panasonic’s ZX1 camera - a super-compact camera with an 8x optical zoom in the run up to Christmas.
Aimed primarily at an audience of 18-24 year old consumers, the key PR creative focused on bringing the camera’s lifestyle and zoom features to the fore via a series of giant model installations that would appear across the UK.
Execution
In early November six giant models of every day objects; a pigeon, a Royal Mail post box, a park bench, a crumpled coffee cup, a conker and a traffic cone appeared overnight in six major UK cities.
Locations in London, Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and Edinburgh were chosen due to their high footfall and proceedings kicked off with a series of regional photo-calls around each installation while two shots were prioritised for a national release; the London image of a giant pigeon and Edinburgh’s oversize conker.
The team got busy selling in the different pictures to both national and regional targets, while a comprehensive online campaign saw the photos seeded to a wide range of relevant websites. National and regional sites were targeted, as well as relevant photography blogs, quirky news sites, and entertainment and lifestyle outlets.
Once we had completed our photography and a full scale national and regional sell in, the models were discreetly branded with Panasonic’s 8x Life banner encouraging people to partake in a Facebook photography competition to win a trip to the Winter Olympics in Vancouver. The prize would be given to the best photograph that played with our concepts of perspective. To add credibility to the competition we brought Alistair Allan, Digital Director of Dazed Digital, on board as guest-judge.
In addition we undertook a Twitter seeding campaign, encouraging our media contacts to post the pics to their own Twitter feeds, in particular regional and photography journalists.
Results…
Our launch pictures ran fully captioned in OK!, The Guardian, Metro, The Scotsman and The Daily Record reaching over 4 Million readers in the week of launch. Regional press were also quick to pick up on our quirky pictures with coverage ranging from The Yorkshire Evening Post to the Belfast Telegraph and The Western Morning News.
Online coverage was impressive with 40+ websites carrying fully credited images including the likes of Yahoo, MSN, Digital Spy, Virgin Media and AOL. The Twitter activity directly led to over 50 messages being posted by relevant users, reaching almost 43,000 followers.
The total reach was estimated to be in the range of 50 Million people worldwide.