Creating Ireland’s first ever Instagram photo awards – The Huawei Snapys.

The Huawei Snapys Instagram photo awards were the perfect opportunity for Huawei to achieve unique positioning in, image quality excellence and connect with their target audience by telling the brand story, inspiring and supporting creators and starting a strong relationship with photography lovers.

By supporting local talent, bonding with the local community, making influential friends and generating tones of user generated content making Huawei a hub in the community.

We approached Instagram, who gave the green light to progress with Ireland’s first ever independent Instagram photography award, the campaign kicked off in July 2015 and ran for 12 weeks.

At the launch event of the Huawei P8 and the Huawei Snapys, we started our digital campaign with a series of media partnerships supported by social media and a PR campaign.

We developed HuaweiSnapys.com, a bespoke multi-channel platform that made the voting and sharing easy, encouraging the community to share.

Community leaders and influencers collaborated as judges and ambassadors, engaging their communities and boosting participation.

We repurposed User Generated Content in executions such as a pop-up photo gallery, a virtual reality app allowing people to get immersed in all the beauty of the entries and digital posters showcasing the best entries offline.

We run a special awards night celebrating the community with 200 shortlisted Instagrammers among 700 RSVPs.

We received an amazing 14,500 entries. Those entries received over 470,000 engagements (Likes/comments). Huawei Ireland now has 3.5x more followers than its competitor Samsung Ireland on instagram.

The campaign culminated in an awards night, with coverage in over 50 media outlets. The campaign generated such a buzz that by year end Huawei was stocked and for sale in 100% of the smartphone sellers.

In a hugely competitive market, and for a relatively unknown brand, Huawei’s market share increased from 4% to 10% by the end of 2015, driven by the P8. Distribution hit 100% in time for the Christmas sale period. The campaign has received internal accolades within Huawei, showing this best in class example of how Huawei can work with social media platforms to drive business growth. Huawei phones were the number 1 smartphone sold in Meteor/Eir store during the Christmas period.