With the average point-and-shoot camera, photographs taken at night or in low-light often come out too dark or blurry. So, Canon developed a new technology, called the HS SYSTEM, that takes sharper photographs in low-light and they challenged us to launch it. Armed with this new technology, we started a project called Your Second Shot, a mission to help real people “recapture” important moments in their lives — by retaking photographs that didn’t turn out the first time around.

First, we had to find our stories - the “lost moments” that deserved a second chance. So we ran teaser print ads, posted ads online and hung up fliers everywhere we could. After receiving hundreds of submissions, we narrowed it down to a handful. And, from a father’s surprise birthday party to a bet involving a mechanical bull, we helped give real people their moments back. We launched with a 30 second TV commercial and a microsite, where users could watch short documentaries on each of the stories and browse photographs from all of the “recaptured” moments. We then ran a short documentary in cinema, as well as interactive banners, a print campaign and web videos that all drove traffic to the site.

In a market that’s continually caught up in a feature war, we successfully made the HS SYSTEM stand out by making it matter to people. We received great feedback about the project across blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc., as well as tons of photo submissions from people who wanted to be a part of it. On average, users spent over 6 minutes on our microsite viewing content. And we increased sales of Canon cameras — at its peak, the campaign helped drive a 38% sales increase compared to the same month the previous year.