Roots Teams up with Canada’s Instagram Platform Developers Candid to Harness Customer Photos

Candid, the first Canadian company invited to join Instagram’s platform developers directory, is a visual commerce platform that tells a brand’s story through the eyes and photos of its fans.

Born out of Toronto’s Extreme Startups accelerator program, Candid is bringing awareness and accessibility in the Canadian marketplace to a technique that is flourishing south of the border.

Candid allows brands to curate photos from their community and display them within an e-commerce experience.

In advance of Canada Day Candid has shared the results of their most Canadian campaign exclusively with Techvibes.

The Roots Canada #findyouradventure campaign was unveiled on Instagram in March and asked fans to hashtag their favourite adventure-related photos with #rootscanada and #findyouradventure to be featured on Roots.com.

Since inception, the campaign has generated 1,900 images on Instagram and garnered the support from international instagrammers as far away as Switzerland. Engagement remained strong over a three-month period and hovered above 40,000 “likes” per week through June.

When showcased prominently on the Roots homepage through a moderated feed, the images experienced a 6.6% on-page engagement.

The Roots campaign highlights an accelerating trend towards “customer-inspired commerce” where brands celebrate their most vocal fans by featuring them on their web properties to create authentic experiences that outperform traditional stock photography.

“A big part of the success of this campaign is the inspiring stories in the photos, you can clearly see the emphasis is on moments and not products. Instagram forces you to think differently about your marketing campaigns – where it really shines is in creating awareness and driving changes in perception through high quality and authentic imagery that’s hard to match,” said Nariman Haghighi, Candid CEO.

”By using tools like Candid we are able to engage and reward the Roots community in an authentic way,” added James Connell, VP E-commerce and Marketing at Roots.

Candid was the first Canadian company invited to join Instagram’s platform developers directory which includes 30 international businesses recognized for technical expertise in helping get brands up and running quickly with Instagram.