‘Live for the Story’ was a new creative platform that repositions the brand in a contemporary way and brings a new purpose to the organisation – namely, to help everyone from smartphone users to professionals become better storytellers.

‘Live for the Story’ stops Canon talking in megapixels and rather starts talking about the one thing that our new target audience, millennials, values most. Experience.

It embodies an attitude that encourages you to go out and have more interesting stories to tell and photograph. It is a call to arms to chase those stories to live a fuller and more eventful life as opposed to waiting for things to happen to you.

In our launch film ‘Boundaries’ we set out to show how small our word is at birth. And how with every step, every journey, our world gets bigger and bigger. More journey, more stories we have to tell.

The Canon 60s and 30s brand spots 'Boundaries' aired in UK and Germany on TV and Cinema from 17th May to 12th June, and in VOD from 19th May to 31st July, including six 6s YouTube bumpers. The edits were also live in 19 markets across EMEA across social, and where local marketing budgets permitted, VOD also. The campaign channel selection was aimed at attracting a new, younger, audience to Canon showing how Canon can be relevant in their lives and the stories they want to tell. In the UK, TV achieved a 72.1% reach of 16-34s, 19m VOD views and an audience of 3.6m in cinema. The overall campaign, including the film was delivered in less than 6 months, no mean feat considering the complexity of film production method, the range of scenarios and the market adaptations required.

The music track, Mikey Mike’s track ‘Doin’ Me’, not only fitted the pace and shooting style, but lyrically summed up our attitude and brand strategy. It instantly resonated with our target audience, becoming the No.1 most Shazamed advertising track in 2017.

This was instrumental in cementing the new positioning, and key to ensuring our paid media activity stemmed the slow but steady decline in brand consideration with an increase of +5pp on ‘relevance’ in TNS Brand Tracking and generated digital footfall to our website with an uplift of 23%. It successfully started building relationships with customers indicated by an uplift of +98pp of registrations to Canon’s digital ecosystem (vs. same time in 2016). And our earned activity brought Canon back into popular culture with extensive coverage on MTV Europe, Vogue, Cosmopolitan and Wonderland magazine as well as 255 other publications resulting in an estimated PR reach of £313m.