Capturing innovation: Exploring the fascination with photography tech firms – Vitis PR

Consumer tech campaigns are both exciting and a challenge for PR professionals. At Vitis PR, we love working with photography tech firms and have worked for brands of all sizes over the years. Here are three reasons why. It’s a welcome challenge The photography clients that we’ve worked with are continuously committed to innovation and that is just as well. Camera technology updates at a dizzying rate and firms who want to get their message across, need to be strategic about their comms to get noticed or for their technology to be understood. With a highly saturated market, PR professionals have to be as innovative as their clients as well as using tried and tested methods. Your client may be either brand new to the market or launching at the same time as a competitor, or several. They might be launching their umpteenth version of their previously launched product or launching a new camera tech month after their last launch. Understanding the client’s vision for the product and the market, explaining the new launches to experienced tech journalists and consumers is challenging. It is really important therefore in the planning stages to define robust strategies to encourage potential customers to pick your product above others, or more challengingly, how to encourage sales of the new product without reducing sales of its previous product. It’s challenging and it encourages creativity – including innovative product blasts, combining campaigns with filmmaking events as well as using tried and tested methods, such as reviews programs. We recently worked for a gimbal manufacturer that regularly launched 2 or 3 new products every few months and successfully managed to secure continuous reviews in relevant media as well as prestigious awards, despite being a relatively new name in a busy marketplace. The work is creative and varied Working for a photography tech firm is never dull. One minute you may be working on a reviews program , elbow-deep in product samples that everyone is vying for if it is a well-known firm. If it’s a newcomer you may have the same number of samples and have to use your contacts to persuade that top journalist to review it (among the hundreds they are also reviewing). Another minute, you may be at a three-day tech event with your client securing interviews for their latest launch. Or it could be launching your client’s new film competition or getting bloggers on board to use and talk about the product, it is never the same. We once wrote a how-to take better pictures article for a previous photography client that magazines and relevant outlets loved. Another time, the photo tech client decided to expand from their core product into a related but new area of technology. Convincing the press that they were equally innovative and demonstrating why, involved a whole new line of thinking. Our passion for your product delivers results Sometimes to launch a new product and to compose press releases or succinctly pitch tech editors, we may not get much more than a spec sheet and a photo of the product which you have to bring to life. Other times, we may get the actual product to handle and put through its paces before launch. It really helps if you love the technology and are au fait with it. With camera tech, it’s usable applicable technology. Once you get beneath the surface of the technology and specs, it is satisfying to help others understand why it might for instance, revolutionise the way a film industry operates, which is what one client’s filmmaking technology aimed to create. Being passionate about your client’s technology is important, journalists and the public will be able to pick up on it in your communications. Even if you do not love your client’s product, it is always useful to find one aspect of it that you admire. Maybe it is an ultra-bright light for vlogging which could transform how good that vlog you’re hooked on, is to watch as a result of it. Either way, finding your passion in your client’s and helping others understand it translates into results. We recently worked with a photography accessory manufacturer to raise its profile in the UK. They had the challenge of being a then lesser known contender in relation to its competitors and based in Asia, needed someone on the ground, familiar with the media, the market and could work seamlessly with them despite differing timezones. Within the two years that we worked for them, we secured hundreds of pieces of coverage making the company a household name. The company had consumer devices, professional devices and later professional photography lighting devices. The manufacturer regularly launched two or three new products every few months and we successfully managed to secure continuous reviews in relevant media as well as prestigious awards. We worked to launch the Kodak PIXPRO new 360 camera range in the UK. At that time there were a large number and variety of action camera types being launched by a multitude of vendors in close succession though, the client needed to differentiate its offerings to stand out from competitors in a market that would quickly become overcrowded. We developed an ongoing media reviews program, punctuated with product blasts and social media posts. We highlighted the USPs for the small, powerful digital action cameras. managed an ongoing media review program and kept potential customers informed via regular product blasts. We smashed our targets in the promotion of the Kodak PIXPRO 4KVR360, and also compact cameras Astro Zoom (AZ) and Friendly Zoom (FZ) camera ranges. We secured reviews from Trusted Reviews, Camera Jabber, The British Photography Industry, Photography Blog, TechRadar and PhotoBite , Fascinating Tech, Mighty Gadget, TechNuovo and ePhotozine . Round-ups featured TechRadar on the Best 360-degree action cameras for travel holidays and Christmas gift guides, such as Sunday Woman , Digital Camera World , The Next Web ,  a Luxury Travel Blog, Holiday Living, Camera Jabber , ePhotozine and TechRadar . Read more here. If you would like to know more about our consumer tech work, please contact us.