Background

Huawei is the largest telecommunications equipment manufacturer in the world, best known globally for its competitively priced mobile phones. To support the launch of Huawei’s latest handset, Priocept worked closely with global advertising agency, Doner, to develop a competition website to promote the new P9 phone.

Doner were tasked with driving mass engagement and advocacy for the P9, to grow its European consumer base. The agency wanted people to stop and think about the importance of every image we share. They developed a 360 campaign incorporating digital, print, social and experiential marketing, articulated in a memorable campaign tag line: Don’t snap, shoot.

Priocept took responsibility for developing the technical solution and for ensuring its timely delivery into live service. This included the campaign hub at dontsnapshoot.com, which hosts a campaign film and competition, and describes the unique features of the P9.

The Concept

The Huawei P9 sports dual 12 megapixel Leica lenses along with matching sensors to capture RGB and monochrome light respectively. This is intended to give sharper images with excellent low-light performance.

To promote this new technology Doner launched a Europe-wide integrated digital campaign with a photography competition targeting aspiring influencers. Entry was simple and social. All they needed to do was post their best photo taken with any smartphone on Instagram, and tag it with #dontsnapshoot.

The competition offered winners the chance to visit Shenzhen and Beijing in China where nine finalists would spend a week exploring the cities and photographing their experience to showcase the P9’s camera quality. Expert panellists for Vogue and GQ then selected a winner whose photos were published in their respective magazines.

The Solution

Priocept understands the importance of developing web applications using software engineering best practices. We believe this approach is just as relevant for a campaign website, designed to live for a limited period, as it is for a business critical e-commerce application.

Cutting corners in the early stages of the development process can significantly increase the effort required in the later stages of a project. This makes deadlines that are already challenging even harder to achieve. The only way to avoid falling into this common pitfall is to ensure a solid foundation is formed right from the outset.

With this in mind, Priocept implemented the solution using a combination of the latest cloud services, web services, UI frameworks and backend technologies.

The solution is comprised of the following components:

• Cloud Hosting – The application was deployed on Amazon Web Services (AWS) using the Elastic Beanstalk service. This takes care of server provisioning and capacity management allowing developers to concern themselves with the application they are building and not with the infrastructure that supports it. Using this service means that virtual servers are automatically created and will cost-effectively scale up or down to meet demand. Hosting on AWS Elastic Beanstalk worked perfectly for Huawei as the goal of the website was to achieve viral growth. Using an elastic cloud hosting service meant that the application was exponentially scalable.
• Application – Backend functionality was developed on the Python web framework, Django, that encourages rapid development and a well architected codebase.
• UI – Priocept developed the site using the React framework. This was originally developed by Facebook to solve maintainability and efficiency issues inherent in traditional HTML/CSS/JavaScript development. It views pages as a set of components each with their own distinct functionality and presentation logic. Developing in this way adds upfront effort but achieves long-term efficiency.
• Hashtagd – The main idea behind the competition was to generate interest on social media by running a photo contest. A key requirement was that a user’s natural behaviour was preserved when entering competitions. Therefore Instagram users were asked to simply tweet a picture with the #dontsnapshoot hashtag in order to enter the competition. No other sign-ups or data submissions were requested from users, which made the process as simple as possible. In order to deliver this functionality, Priocept used the Hashtagd API for managing the competition and integrating images into the website.
• CircleCI – The project was run in an agile manner with changes iteratively released to the live site. To support this process Priocept implemented continuous integration (CI) by configuring automated builds and deployments using CircleCI.
• Docker – Priocept developed the backend application inside Docker containers designed using Docker Compose, which capture all of the configurations and dependencies required for the application to run. It also provides an abstraction layer between the application and the underlying platform upon which it is running, allowing consistency between local development environments and the AWS based production environments.

Results

The project showcased Priocept and Doner’s ability to develop and execute innovative digital campaigns together.

The competition ran successfully for eight weeks and inspired over 100,000 posts on Instagram and Facebook. The campaign website has so far received millions of page views and continues to generate interest in the P9 phone. An engaging marketing solution was delivered by using the latest cloud technologies, integrating with social media platforms and following an assured delivery process. These features, along with careful project management, ensured that each stage of the competition was launched on the advertised dates.