Adobe approached us to develop a social-first activation as a part of their ongoing “Your Shot, Your Story” campaign, an episodic photography activation featuring thematic photography styles (ex. architecture, night, color, self-portraits) brought to life through the stories of local and global photographers. The theme for this particular installment was Self Portrait, and the hero photographer was Marina Williams.
We had noticed that the photography community on Instagram and TikTok had widely adopted the use of audio to share their work and discover fellow artists. We saw the opportunity to participate in this social trend as a means of engaging audiences with the theme of self portraiture, the campaign and Lightroom itself.
Our primary goals for this activation were social engagements, across Lightroom and influencer channels, as well as engagement with the audio itself.
We executed a four-tiered plan, putting Marina Williams front and center in conversation with @Lightroom followers, supplemented by micro-influencer and paid support.
In phase one, we launched an organic Instagram Q&A series via Stories with Marina as our hero influencer. The photography community on social media is actively curious and hungry to learn; across all platforms, Lightroom comment sections overflow with curiosity about topics ranging from conceptualizing a photoshoot to the granularity of HSL sliders. Based on this insight, we understood that Q&A / tutorial content was not only wanted, but needed by the community across the spectrum of skill levels. By engaging with the photography community and answering questions directly from them, we were able to get a better understanding for what tutorial content deserved more attention, leading into phase two.
In phase two, Marina Williams created four tutorial videos to answer the most-asked questions from the Q&A that were shared on Lightroom’s Instagram channel as well as Marina’s Instagram and TikTok. The tutorials were quick & engaging, and primed the photography community to engage with phase three.
In phase three we created an original audio in collaboration with Marina that focused on the theme of self-portraiture and encouraged our audiences to share their work. The original audio, which is a succinct, 8-second audio following a “This is me, this is me photographing me, this is me editing me, and this is me” script, has a clear CTA for photographers to easily take part in. Marina’s original video had clear shots correlated to the audio script, and laid out a very easy-to-follow structure and style for other photographers to mimic or personalize in their videos.
To mobilize the Lightroom community and reach new mobile users, in phase four we partnered with micro influencers on Instagram and TikTok. The influencers were commissioned to create one TikTok + Reel with the original sound, as well as one additional tutorial video focused on self-portraiture.
In total we shared 24 posts as a part of this campaign, garnering 31,346,374 impressions and 1,488,931 total engagements. Not only did we see above-benchmark social performance across all metrics, we noticed that the audio itself became a hub for photographers to use to share their work and discover one another. The audio has been used 150+ times but beyond this, we saw users returning to the audio months after it was shared to continue using it and to comment on each other’s videos to share praise and encouragement. This social-first activation proved to deliver upon our goal of engaging audiences in the theme of self-portraiture and empowering them to learn more about photography & photo editing.
