Canon's ad agency bought a time machine and
made a website from the 1980's.
But be forewarned that the site took over a minute to load on my broadband connection.
And this on the heels of a lavishly produced but sparsely attended show here in Austin from their consumer printer division in which they showed maybe 100 framed and matted prints to an invited audience of maybe 35 people at the Austin Music Hall. They seemed desperate to fill the space even with complimentary alcohol and nice catering.
While I will make no judgement on the content or style of the images shown it was sad to hear that Canon printed all of the files themselves because the actual printing was the weak part of the show. That, and the fact that all the prints were printed in the same palette at the same exact size and format.
Homogenous. Flat. All printed on the same Lustre paper. If these two incidents are examples of their advertising agency's best work it's high time they shopped around... maybe find some college kids in an apartment who haven't lost all of their mojo and still have some enthusiasm for stuff that's new and different.
I'm sure someone will suggest that I don't like Canon cameras and that's not the point here. The point is that maybe part of the problem in camera sales is that the damn ad agencies handling the accounts don't have a clue how to talk to photographers. That's a big hurdle. And I'm not just singling out Canon. At this point, if I was on the Canon internal marketing team, I'd just bag the traditional ad agencies and start crowdsourcing the creative. It couldn't be worse and it would be a hell of a lot cheaper.....
19 comments:
Where I'm sitting, the page took less than five seconds (using a clock sweep second hand to measure) to load during which a subset of the the text you featured was displayed -- too brief to read.
But then I was presented with a number of scenarios, most using nice brief story-style videos, introducing Canon technologies.
Overall, a nice piece of marketing with some rough UI edges.
Perhaps you were victim of some technological gremlins. Or maybe the site was broken and is now fixed.
I tried the "see impossible" link.
They're right. It's impossible -- stalling out at 49% of the download with just an animated box repeatedly flipping its sides and top.
And that's with a broadband connection testing out just north of 20 mb/s.
How much do you think they paid for this?
typingtalker, you must have seen a much different site than I did. I thought the graphics were just awful and the videos, while well produced, cloying and dated.
I've gone back and looked again. I won't be apologizing for this comment...
i woke up and RUSHED to my ipad to check what the announcement was... 5 seconds later i was rolling my eyes and thinking "............canon............."
oh, also, the site took about 30 secs for me to load, so its gotten better! yay canon??? lol. it did feel dated, and slow to respond. it must be HIGH DEMAND! ;)
It looks to me like Canon's death knell is sounding. How quickly can they divest themselves of their customer base?
Thought I'd comment while waiting for the Little Red Box on that site to...Oh, there it is...no, wait, not quite, shows 100% but still no site...meanwhile, is it possible they meant "Canon Seems Impossible?"
Nikon did the next big thing teaser campaign many years ago and it had the same results.... Crickets. It shows that nikon and canon management, lower case on purpose, are truly stupid. Buy Olympus, Sony, Panasonic, or Fuji!
Ouch. You know, never mind the flash style website build, never mind that odd box they have included next to their logo... my biggest issue was that instead of telling peoples stories, real stories, they made mini fiction movies. The woman smashing her cups at home after her book isnt published... talk about melodrama!!
I found it loaded no problem, but was otherwise unremarkable
While the site loaded with reasonable dispatch for me, the destination was hardly worth it.
I am astonished that such a global effort was made to present the briefest of blurbs about the company and its products.
The only thing this campaign has done is to go viral but I hardly think this is the viral they had in mind.
Being so close to photokina I would have been really suprised if they had showed something really remarkable.
Totally agree though that this was very anti-climax. The amount of marketing could have gone into bringing a new mirrorless or even the rumoured medium-format camera to the market, but no..
1,300 comments on dpreview! I didn't read many, but the ones I did were hyper critical of Canon--and deservedly so.
The Japanese are running out of fuel!
I don't mean to hijack the post but I'm frustrated in general with Canon marketing. I teach a photo class at a small local university. We have used a somewhat elderly Epson R2400 for prints. It always worked well and made good-looking prints, especially B&W. Last term Canon gifted the school with 3 of their printers. The one that I'm obliged to use makes bad prints and has several defects right out of the box. Worse, the school won't buy ink for the old Epson. Tonight the class topic is making prints. Not sure what the heck to do, except maybe upload student files to the local Costco, which makes admirable prints, cheap. Rant over.
This site reminded me of the heyday of Flash-based marketing sites. Takes me back 10-14 years to when the web was a mess. Thanks Canon. Your marketing and web team managed to successfully avoid all the great advances in web site design and development made in the last six years.
Oh wow:
"This site is best experienced with WebGL enabled"
or indeed "Best Viewed in Internet Explorer 4" ?
gosh, I feel 10 years younger.
I have worked on a number of online projects that are funded and run by University professors in their 50s and 60s. They have boundless faith in "interactivity" but little-to-no idea what that might mean, beyond animated graphics doing things with pizzazz (never mind the fact that static graphics would be clearer in the same place...). By the time they're done telling you everything they want in a web-site and you build it for them, it's a cludgy dog's breakfast that even they don't like.
This campaign reminds me of doing that work...
To add to TheaterCulutre's point, the site reminded me very much of the excesses of bad PowerPoint presentations. A case of throwing in every feature they could find, just because it was there.
The site loaded easily.
Why must it download UNLESS it's looking at you, the viewer..
When you see what is there, well
it's really sad.Pathetic.
i used to wonder how come Leica, such a small company compared to CanoNikon, is so highly regarded?
The fact of matter is all the photographs done and shown by Leica photographers.Their philosophy and actual results are vast,compared to CanoNikon.
Their site is more about "latest" equipment.The name "Impossible" made me think Polaroid. wow!
A sheer waste of time and effort.
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