Following the launch of its latest flagship phone, Huawei wanted to sustain interest with a digital campaign across Europe that would establish its credentials as the world’s most sophisticated camera phone powered by Artificial Intelligence.

The trouble was Huawei was a relatively unknown brand, and Apple’s iPhone owned smartphone photography following its incredible ‘Shot on an iPhone’ campaign.

So we sought to break down the barriers between consumers and AI, and show photo-lovers that Huawei’s new AI phone has the power to improve their photography.

The World’s first photography competition judged by a phone.

The war in smartphones is fought in photography, dominated by bigger brands. So, to get the AI-powered Huawei P20 Pro noticed by our photo-loving audience we decided not show a single one of its photos, we got it to judge everyone else’s instead.

Rather than persuade the audience to pick up a P20 Pro, we allowed them to experience

its superiority through their current smartphones – inviting them to get their best photos judged by the P20 Pro’s AI through social media, for the chance to win a P20 photography masterclass in Florence.

Using 4 million professional images we trained the P20 Pro’s AI to judge the beauty

of any photo. We then needed a way to deliver the campaign at scale to our audience, allowing individual image rating, moderating and responses in real time. So we created a Chatbot delivered through Facebook Messenger allowing the AI to speak for itself, offer advice, walk people through how to enter, and to share their results.

To target Europe’s photo-loving community, we teamed up with 63 influencers across 10 markets who participated themselves and invited their audiences to take part too, while targeted ads were placed in people’s Instagram and Facebook feeds.

Through our chatbot, influencers and direct comms, we set 5 challenges over an 8 week period through July and August 2018 and sustained interest – creating an ongoing relationship with a new, warm community.

The campaign achieved the following:

• 1.23M entries - world‘s largest photo competition

• 2,600% above target KPI

• 353,659 email addresses captured

• 335,568 organic shares

• 179M impressions

• During the campaign period, Huawei overtook Apple in smartphone shipments to become the second largest manufacturer with 16% global market share.