Cloth­ing retail­er Old Navy cel­e­brat­ed its birth­day by ask­ing fans to sub­mit self­ies for the chance to win prizes. The mar­ket­ing tac­tic of uti­liz­ing self­ies is noth­ing new – any­one who watched the 2014 Oscars knows that. But, unlike Ellen DeGeneres’ “spon­ta­neous” shot for Sam­sung, which became the most retweet­ed image of all time, Old Navy is among the brands try­ing to con­vince con­sumers to take pho­tos of them­selves as part of a larg­er con­tent effort. Tap­ping into con­sumers’ col­lec­tive egos is like­ly not a bad strat­e­gy, but are there any oth­er rea­sons con­sumers are com­pelled to cre­ate self­ies on behalf of brands? And what do mar­keters need to know before ask­ing fans to ready their cam­era phones?

Old Navy is cel­e­brat­ing its 20^th birth­day with a Self­iebra­tion machine, which is basi­cal­ly what it sounds: The cloth­ing retail­er teamed up with “inno­va­tion stu­dio” Deeplo­cal to build a 15-foot-tall machine that dis­plays con­sumer-sub­mit­ted self­ies in the form of near­ly 1,000 cus­tom-made bal­loons that are inflat­ed to vary­ing degrees to cre­ate the customer’s like­ness thanks to near­ly five miles of wiring, accord­ing to a how-it-was-made video.

Per Deeplo­cal, the Self­iebra­tion Machine was on dis­play in Times Square in New York and at Hol­ly­wood and High­land in Los Ange­les this month.

In the video, Greg Bal­tus, direc­tor of tech­ni­cal pro­duc­tion at Deeplo­cal, said the machine is designed to do two self­ies per minute and will be up and run­ning for eight hours, so the brand is hop­ing to do 1,000 self­ies per day.

An Old Navy rep was not avail­able for fur­ther com­ment.

How­ev­er, accord­ing to hash­tag ana­lyt­ics ser­vice Tag­board, the #Self­iebra­tion hash­tag is being used about 23 times per hour and 72 per­cent of the tweets are pos­i­tive.

To par­tic­i­pate in Old Navy’s #Self­iebra­tion cam­paign, con­sumers sub­mit a self­ie, along with a wish such as for a vaca­tion in Bali, pay­ing off stu­dent loans or a pony, and tag the post with #self­iebra­tion. The brand says par­tic­i­pants will have a chance to win their wish.

Old Navy fol­lows the self­ie foot­steps of a num­ber of oth­er brands.

For exam­ple, British retail­er Ted Baker’s Mer­ry Kiss­mas cam­paign for hol­i­day 2013 asked con­sumers to take pic­tures of them­selves in front of sev­er­al mistle­toe instal­la­tions and sub­mit them via Twit­ter or Insta­gram with the hash­tag #KissT­ed, offer­ing a poten­tial vaca­tion as reward.

In a sim­i­lar vein, the Axe line of men’s groom­ing prod­ucts asked fans to sub­mit pho­tos of them­selves kiss­ing with the hash­tag #Kiss­for­Peace in Jan­u­ary, which social media man­age­ment sys­tem Sprout Social says gen­er­at­ed more than 10,000 tweets and 8,000 posts on Insta­gram.

The brand also cre­at­ed a #Kiss­for­Peace video that has since been viewed more than 7.4 mil­lion times.

For its part, Turk­ish Air­lines enlist­ed the help of ath­letes Kobe Bryant and Lionel Mes­si in its #Self­ieShootout cam­paign, which has a stag­ger­ing 139 mil­lion views. The video was accom­pa­nied by a Self­Shot iPhone app, which allows fans to shoot self­ies and paste them­selves into var­i­ous sce­nar­ios, such as on safari with a lion or in the jun­gle with a mon­key, for a chance to win a free flight.

And beau­ty brand Dove had anoth­er video hit with “Self­ie,” which debuted in Jan­u­ary, and includes moth­er-daugh­ter duos “redefin­ing” beau­ty with self­ies. It has since been viewed more than 1 mil­lion times even though it is more than eight min­utes long. A relat­ed web­site asks fans to sub­mit pho­tos (not just self­ies), videos or fin­ish the state­ment #feel­beau­ti­ful­for.

“I think Dove is an excel­lent exam­ple of a brand using self­ies to cre­ate emo­tion­al and moti­va­tion­al user-gen­er­at­ed con­tent,” said Jen­nifer Beese, news edi­tor at Sprout Social. “The adop­tion of self­ies is used as part of a larg­er ini­tia­tive by the brand and fits in nice­ly with their over­all mes­sage of real beau­ty.”

Beese’s best tip for brands?

“There has to be val­ue behind the ask,” she said. “If a brand asks fans to take self­ies for the sake of incor­po­rat­ing a trend, nobody wins. Incor­po­rat­ing self­ies into a big­ger cam­paign or strat­e­gy can be extreme­ly reward­ing for every­one involved.”

In addi­tion, self­ies, which require con­sumers to actu­al­ly take time to cre­ate con­tent, which is some­times a dan­ger­ous thing to ask, can also help human­ize a brand.

“Yes, we are, of course, all ego­ma­ni­acs, but peo­ple real­ly strive for authen­tic­i­ty and trans­paren­cy today and I think there’s noth­ing more trans­par­ent or authen­tic than a self­ie because you’re show­ing your­self the way you are right then,” said con­sul­tant Bar­ry Moltz.

That being said, Moltz said con­sumers have to real­ly love the brand before they’re will­ing to sub­mit con­tent like a self­ie.

In oth­er words, while many brands like Old Navy, Ted Bak­er, and Turk­ish Air­lines offer rewards in exchange for self­ies, Moltz said that for some fans, noto­ri­ety and/or appear­ing next to the brand they love is reward enough.

Dunkin’ Donuts sort of taps into this notion with its Fan of the Week pro­mo­tion on Face­book. While not strict­ly lim­it­ed to self­ies, the brand asks fans for pho­tos of them­selves with Dunkin’ Donuts prod­ucts and rewards these enthu­si­as­tic fans by mak­ing their pho­tos the brand’s pro­file pho­to and dis­play­ing the fan pho­tos on a bill­board in Times Square.

What do you think about the brand­ed use of self­ies?