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IDEA to fire up again?

The Imaging and Digital Entertainment Association has plans to re-activate in the second half of this year after a long period of inactivity.

The news follows our story last week revealing IDEA has reserves of $400,00, but only seven or eight remaining members. The IDEA newsletter, Grapevine, stopped being sent out to subscribers around October last year and the last industry even organised by IDEA was in 2015.

The focus of the renewed program is on converting smartphone photographers to take photos with cameras. IDEA president James Murray (Nikon) told Inside Imaging that invitations were sent out to the current eight members of IDEA (Nikon, Kayell, Epson, Leica, CR Kennedy, Camera House, Olympus and Next Media) along with lapsed members back to 2015, inviting them to respond with proposals to help promote the smartphone-to-camera objective. Successful applicants would be sponsored by IDEA on a dollar-for-dollar basis, up to a ceiling (which wasn’t revealed). He said ‘quite a few’ members and past members responded.

The activity could be a workshop or seminar event or even an advertising campaign. A few events were scheduled for the first half of this year but had to be postponed or cancelled due to the Coronavirus lockdown. James mentioned Nikon, Kayell, CR Kennedy Leica and Epson as members whose projects were accepted, with events now to take place in the second half of 2020 through to 2021. We don’t have any further details at this stage, with Coronavirus no doubt still an issue. The sponsorship program in now closed to new applicants.

There are no other initiatives planned in areas engaged industry associations sometimes involve themselves in, such as lobbying government, or promoting their industry segment to the broader public.

There are no firm plans for activities to generate new revenue, and James conceded that would be a challenge. He said that IDEA continued to be open to membership from other photo industry distributors, but conceded that it would be difficult to attract new members ($385 to join plus annual subscription of $550) because potential members would ‘struggle to see value in joining’.

 

One Comment

  1. Robert Scott Robert Scott June 26, 2020

    Sensor size beats megapixels every time, smartphones are a bit like when Kodak introduced the 110 film. Most people do not back up the photos from smart phones so when they loose there phone as a lot seem to do family photos are lost.

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