• ASOS
• AVG
• Baileys
• BBC
• bmibaby
• Cancer Research UK
• CWJobs
• Diageo
• EMI
• Festo
• Hotel Chocolat
• Indesit Company
• Kenwood
• Marketing Week Live!
• Mirror Group
• NSPCC
• Powwownow
• PSP / Go View
• RSPCA
• Sanex
• Sony Europe
• Sony UK
• Ubisoft
• Videojug

The Sony World Photography Awards awareness programme inspires photography enthusiasts worldwide

Tapping into passions to generate over 60,000 competition entries with relevant conversations

Aims

Working alongside Sony's creative agencies, our aim was to raise awareness of the competition and persuade photography enthusiasts of all levels to participate in the competition. To do this we had to inspire, educate and engage individuals and communities online and ultimately increase entries to the awards.

Activities

immediate future worked in partnership with the central PR team at Sony Europe on a seven month pan-European awareness programme.

Tapping into people's passions
We began by looking at the different genres of photography categories in the awards - such as current affairs, sport, fashion and music - and matched them up with the passions of influencers (bloggers, community managers, website editors etc.)

Having identified the influencers, we decided that a highly personal approach was needed to encourage participation. So at every stage of the campaign, we sent news updates, set up interviews with SWPA judges, showcased inspiring images and exclusive examples of last year's entries which served to motivate people to enter. The images were a powerful tool, so were re-used as a means to create conversations.

Raising awareness through SEO and editorial partnerships
The campaign was enhanced with SEO PR using identified key search terms to ensure increased online visibility. Editorial partnerships with leading advocates such as Environmental Graffiti (who receive over 900,000 unique visitors per month to their site), helped to heighten awareness with ongoing updates, images and news.

Continuing the conversations
Relationships with online influencers were reinforced as the immediate future team took six bloggers to the 2009 awards ceremony in Cannes. They reported live from the events (via Twitter and on their own blogs) and brought the experience to life for their readers through interviews with winners, video and image galleries. This coverage sustained the excitement and conversations after the awards. Securing these relationships for SWPA 2010 proved beneficial for driving future entries.

Additional competitions were set up on various European lifestyle sites, including FHM (Spain and Germany), Shortlist (UK) and Stuff TV (UK) to encourage people to submit an image that ‘captures the beauty and spirit of football in unexpected places.' Exclusive interviews and features were also set up with
the chairing judge of this award, Delly Carr on FIFA.com, to encourage participation from football enthusiasts.

Results

Before activity started, the term "Sony World Photography Awards 2009" returned only 469 results in Google. After activity there were 361,000 results: a 770-fold increase.

Online presence within the blogosphere increased considerably too with results in Google Blog search increasing from just 9 results before the campaign to 6,851 results in April 2009.

A total of 63,934 images were submitted to the competition overall.