We discuss the interest of escort distributions and Rényi entropy in the context of source coding. We first recall a source coding theorem by Campbell relating a generalized measure of length to the Rényi-Tsallis entropy. We show that the associated optimal codes can be obtained using considerations on escort-distributions. We propose a new family of measure of length involving escort-distributions and we show that these generalized lengths are also bounded below by the Rényi entropy. Furthermore, we obtain that the standard Shannon codes lengths are optimum for the new generalized lengths measures, whatever the entropic index. Finally, we show that there exists in this setting an interplay between standard and escort distributions.