Canon has inked a deal with streaming giant Netflix, which sees its documentary series Tales by Light available globally.
In what can be described as branded content gold, season one of the series will be accessible to Netflix's 86 million subscribers worldwide.
Speaking with AdNews, Canon's director of consumer imaging and executive producer of the series Jason McLean says that having a brand such as Netflix validate the quality of its content is hugely exciting.
“Netflix is such a disrupter and it's trying to find content that viewers are interested in, so for us personally it's a pretty big compliment and an endorsement of what's been made," McLean says.
“As a brand we're excited, but Netflix obviously thought the content was good enough and interesting enough that it wanted to use it to strengthen its documentary offering, which is great.”
Tales by Light has just wrapped its second series, which follows several famed photographers as they shoot some of the world's most interesting locations. Despite all photographers shoot using Canon equipment there is no other mention of the Canon brand.
McLean explains the series was picked up by Netflix purely because of the quality of the content, not because of the brand's association with it.
Canon as a business has been moving away from creating traditional advertising in favour of experiences for sometime now, and when asked if this deal was vindication this strategy has worked for the business, McLean says: “I wouldn't say it is vindication, but we created something not for Netflix and the fact they’ve come to us and wanted to use it, is pretty impressive. It's a nice compliment.”
When asked if this brand is monitoring any metrics surrounding this content deal, McLean explained Canon will be listening to what people are saying about the series now it's on Netflix as well as tracking brand recognition, but he doesn't believe this will be a direct sales driver.
While series two currently won't appear on Netflix, McLean says there is interest from the streaming player to feature the second series.
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