Speaking as a guy who long suffered with a job in ad agencies, some observations:
- Having a domain name reserved a year in advance is done generally only for very planned campaigns. This isn’t the product-to-promote-for-the-quarter, but rather a major effort budgeted in FY 2013 (I believe Canon has a calendar fiscal year).
- The watermark behind the text is of the box logo, which means that they had no budget for any sort of imagery, or - more likely - they are going to introduce a physical product and do not wish to step on their suspense by having any of it appear until tomorrow.
- There is no attempt to capture visitors to the site with an email notification or even a social following request other than the standard one that appears at the bottom of all Canon pages. This suggests to me that they are using their main traditional media agency for this project, rather than, well, someone who knows how things should done in 2014 (which isn’t a cut on Canon, as this is how it’s generally done with large brands).
- This is, indeed, a poor copy of the old Apple campaign framed as a toast to the “think different” crowd. Interestingly, they even copied the deliberate grammatical oddness in order to create a mind-sticking emphasis. It “should” have been “think differently,” and it sticks in your head the more for it being slightly improper. Canon dropped the article before impossible. It should have been “the impossible” to complete the cliche. All this said, they’ve done it poorly because “We see impossible” can mean that they *are* the nay-sayers. This suggests to me that the copy/concept originated in Japan, and the U.S. agency is, as usual, taking orders. It suggests that parsing the text isn’t terribly fruitful. One last note on the ad copy: it harkens quite consistently to Canon’s previous ads that feature users of their products, borrowing cool and artistic merit from the efforts made with their products. I think this last note is the most predictive of what we’re going to see.
- Canon has a long history of using teasers for very lame introductions that otherwise wouldn’t even be noticed. The most recent was that ad in India that got this forum all excited for a week.
- The subdomain is attached as a sub-sub domain to the USA website, which suggests this is not a global release. This is bad news for you guys looking for the 1D whatever, or other product that would fit into its global competitive offerings.
- The choice of the NYT does suggest an attempt to reach a national audience, rather than the artistic community in NY. Interestingly, they appear to have bought only print. They have purchased neither the biz, technology or art sections of NYT.com
- A rule of thumb in media is to purchase at least twice as much media in the main campaign as you’ve purchased in the teaser part. This isn’t hewed to very consistently, but they probably dropped a $150-200k on the NYT ad pags, so a follow-on campaign might be a half million dollars, which for Canon is a significant campaign.
- This leaves me guessing it’s
A) a printer that has some sort of networking or other feature to which IT departments will have an auto-immune reaction (thus explaining lots of the language, attempting to inoculate against the inevitable vetoes)
B) the launch of some sort of social media/media effort to show off cool things Americans do with Canon cameras.
C) something even lamer
