Imagine the scene. Instagram is a baby, but it has a growing number of superfans creating content and starting to meet up for photowalks and the likes.
In 2013, as an experiment, my marketing agency 'Connector' ran a pop-up Instagram Gallery, aka Instagallery, event in Dublin, where we mixed a gallery evening with booze and a DJ. We had 200 Instafans as guests and 'a great time was had by all' as they say.
I thought to myself, this was amazing, how can we take this to the next level? How about giving awards for the best photos? Nice!
How about calling it 'The Instagrammys'? Epic!
We got to work on preparing the idea and pitching to potential partners. As we said at the time, "The Instagrammys have great PR potential and will associate your brand with the best digital photographs in Ireland. We will have categories for all brands, and we will have interactive fun online and offline to make this the coolest new awards ceremony for 2015".
Being nervous about the name getting us sued by Instagram and The Grammys, I approached Instagram about getting the OK for the name. As we had to make a significant investment in the project, including hosting two big events and building a voting platform, we couldn't afford to take the chance of a last-minute takedown.
We eventually got through to the top brass at Instagram. Damn. We were declined with The Instagrammys, but they were fine with the alternative option, 'The Snapys'.
Ok, let's go!
Fast forward a few months, and we got Huawei on board as the headline sponsor for the Huawei Snapys Irish Instagram Awards. This was their first consumer marketing campaign in Ireland, and all their social media was now managed by the team at Connector. All this came after we beat off some agency heavyweights in a pitch process.
Here is the first of many events we ran for Justin Costello's team - this event, which doubled up as the launch of the P8 smartphone, was held at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin.
We worked closely with Huawei for six years before the sale of Connector in February 2020.
Thanks Justin Costello, and all the team at Huawei Ireland.
Hi to all in the video including Lili Forberg, Allan Dixon and Nialler9.
This reminds me how much I love a good launch party!
More on this soon ...
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