• by Christine Champagne , August 2, 2007

Nikon's Picturetown campaign focuses on the intimidation factor. Christine Champagne reports

The digital SLR camera market is seeing a healthy resurgence, thanks largely to falling prices. This year, with prices dropping to the $500 to $600 range, consumers are expected to purchase 2 million such cameras, up from 1.7 million last year, says Ed Lee, director of consumer services and digital photography trends service at InfoTrends in Weymouth, Mass.

Still, while cheaper prices have lowered the barrier to entry, another factor keeps some consumers from buying these cameras: intimidation. Simply put, some people fear that a digital SLR just might be too much camera for them to handle.

"The cameras can seem technical," Lee acknowledges, "but because they come with auto modes and program modes, they can be as simple to use as a point-and-shoot camera."

That's what Nikon is trying to prove with its Picturetown campaign for the Nikon D40 digital SLR. "That's something that guided this campaign - the desire to take on the intimidation factor that comes with digital SLRs," says Larry Platt, senior creative director at New York's McCann-Erickson, the advertising agency that created the campaign.

While the Nikon D40 can be used by anyone, the camera is specifically designed for people who want to take better pictures but aren't expert photographers.

"In large part, that would be people who are currently shooting with other kinds of digital cameras, specifically digital point-and-shoot, which have certain advantages, but photographically, they can't do what a digital SLR can do," Platt says. "Truly anybody can take a great picture with this camera."

McCann-Erickson and Nikon set out to prove that point via the social experiment at the core of the integrated Picturetown campaign, handing out Nikon D40 cameras to the 200 residents of Georgetown, S.C., and sending them off to snap photos. Director Sam Bayer of HSI Productions documented the effort in a series of commercials that are running both on TV and in movie theaters. The people and their pictures are also featured in a series of print ads - accompanied by life-size, die-cut pullouts of the D40 - in magazines ranging from Newsweek to Lucky.

The die-cut cameras are also being handed out at movie theaters where the commercials are shown. Doing so shows potential customers - and women in particular - that the D40 is not a large, bulky camera, Platt says.

Size matters when it comes to digital SLRs, adds Lee.  "Probably the thing that many consumers object most to is the size of the cameras."

Banner ads, including ones with video and rich media, have been placed on sites such as Imaging-Resource.com, Sports Illustrated.com and NationalGeographic.com.

Initiative handled the offline media buy, while id Media took care of the online media buy.

Picture it

Ultimately, the offline and online components drive traffic to the Stunningnikon.com/picturetown microsite, which serves as the central hub for this campaign. The main feature of the site is a gallery featuring the photos taken by the residents of Georgetown. There are about 250 pictures on the site, ranging from portraits of people and pets to picturesque landscapes. Visitors to the site can comment on the photos, e-mail them to friends and download them.

Visitors can also get to know the amateur photographers who took the photos through video profiles. Among the people featured are Rebecca Porter, a mom who snaps pictures of her family, and Mark Collins, a boat captain who loves taking pictures of wildlife, especially dolphins.

Additionally, there is a section of the Picturetown site that introduces visitors to the D40 itself and explains more about the camera's features. There is also a sweepstakes - the prize is a D40, of course.

From the start of this campaign, there was no question that the Picturetown site would be at the center of the marketing effort for the D40. 

"The Web offers a tremendous opportunity not only to engage consumers but to show the end results of the photography, to display this work in a manner no other medium could," Platt says.

MRM Worldwide, the interactive unit of McCann, created and executed the Picturetown site. "From a creative perspective, our aim was to design a site that wouldn't get between the user and the content," says MRM associate creative director Ingrid Ducmanis. "We really wanted the personalities of the people and the town to come through. In addition, we consciously kept the navigation and structure simple to reinforce the overall messaging that the Nikon D40 is easy to use. A technically complicated site would have undermined that idea."

Campaign Close-up

Sam Cannon, a group creative director in digital marketing agency Organic's San Francisco office, was impressed enough by the Picturetown campaign to blog about it on threeminds.organic.com. And in an interview with OMMA, Cannon praised the smart decisions made in the design of the Picturetown site, including the choice to display the images taken by the residents of Georgetown full bleed, really allowing visitors to appreciate them.

Cannon also found the ability to reposition the site's menu system, depending on the composition of each photo, a helpful function, in that it allowed better views of each image. He appreciated the site's integration of D40 product information.

"Oftentimes, you will see a nice, beautiful campaign site but then when you actually want nuts and bolts information [about the product being advertised], you have to leave the site," Cannon says.

Cannon does have one major gripe about Picturetown: While he thinks the images were well curated, he found the photo gallery setup disappointing.

"Ironically, the gallery is my least favorite part of the site from a user-experience standpoint," Cannon says.  "When you get to the Picturetown gallery itself, they do these tiny, tiny little jpegs on this massive brick wall, and when you pull them up, you get the full bleed again, which is nice. But to get from one photo to another or across photos sets isn't as easy as I would have liked. That's something Flickr has really spoiled me with-you can browse by type of photo, photographer. That kind of browsability is just not here."

That said, Cannon gives the site and the Picturetown campaign overall high marks. He was particularly impressed by how the offline media, the print ads in particular, succeed in creating interest in the Picturetown site. Cannon's first exposure to the Picturetown campaign was through a print ad in ESPN The Magazine featuring one of the residents of Georgetown. Given that he is a creature of the Web, that surprised him.

"What is really interesting to me [about this campaign] is in this day and age, where there is all this talk of traditional media waning, or it not being as effective as it used to be," Cannon muses, "we see traditional media placement working very effectively to drive us to a deeper story on the Web."