To create awareness and consideration for the new Huawei P20 Pro, we were given an experiential brief to deliver product demonstrations of its revolutionary AI-powered photography to our audience, with a hard KPI of 50,000 unique engagements.

But with competitor brand loyalty as high as 70%*, getting our audience to go out of their way to have a meaningful and relevant active engagement with a brand that most of them can’t even pronounce, was going to be a challenge. To put it mildly.

We knew our audience lived on social media. But with almost 400m photos shared daily across Facebook and Instagram alone, we needed to think smarter than just showing off our great photography if we wanted to make an impact.

*(Merrill Lynch Global Research 2018)

THE P20 PRO PHOTO HIJACK

Getting people to put down the phone they love and experience ours, would be near impossible. So, we did the opposite. We demoed our phone, on theirs – encouraging our audience to take more photos with their current devices and send them to be rated by the P20 Pro’s revolutionary AI aesthetic scoring ability.

In the world’s first photography competition judged by a phone, the audience connected their phones directly with ours through Facebook Messenger, sending their shots straight to the P20 Pro. Its AI then sent them back, watermarked with a rating and logo – effectively hijacking every entry from every competitor phone to create 1.23m user-generated ads for the P20 Pro.

This first-of-its-kind product demo allowed the audience to rate their photos in seconds after taking their shot – experiencing the P20 Pro’s superior photographic ability through their current phones, wherever they were.

Our audience were creative expressionists across Europe. Photography is their universal culture-defining language. They seek recognition for their artistic eye, heavily contributing to the 300m Facebook and 95m Instagram photos shared daily.

•To reach our audience, we engaged them directly on the tools of their creativity: their smartphones.

•To overcome competitor brand loyalty, we created a mobile photo competition challenging the audience to see how good their photos really are.

•To overcome low awareness and brand saliency, we leveraged the reach and endorsement of trusted influencers.

•To showcase our five key AI features, we gave the competition five episodes.

•To overcome geographical barriers and achieve scale, we made taking part easy through a chatbot on Facebook Messenger.

•To maximise engagement, we took the fear of peer judgement out of the process, allowing people to enter photos privately with the P20 Pro and see their score before deciding whether to share.

We unlocked the AI aesthetic scoring ability on a P20 Pro and plugged the handset directly into a chatbot on Facebook Messenger. This gave us a direct channel from our phone to theirs.

People interacted directly with our AI – submitting their photos and receiving them back with the P20 Pro’s rating, plus tips on how its AI could have improved their shot. In turn, we talked to them directly about the P20 Pro and each new challenge when it came live.

We set 5 photographic challenges over 8 weeks, each highlighting a different AI photography capability of the P20 Pro.

The competition spanned 10 European markets, with key influencers in each market being first to get their photos rated by the P20 Pro.

Targeted ads and videos on Facebook and Instagram supported the campaign, while prizes included 50 P20 Pros, plus a Leica Masterclass in Florence.

o 1.23 million entries – the world’s largest ever photo competition.

o 565,637 new warm leads from our target audience – over 1,100% above our 50K KPI.

o 335,568 organic shares on social media.

o Doubled consideration for Huawei in Europe to 10.3%