When a business spends tens of thousands of dollars on a full-page newspaper ad, why would it spend $0 on the photography for that ad? With the company image at stake, why would a national company get an amateur to do a quick snapshot with a cell phone?
The Globe and Mail today published an ad supplement about franchising. The online version isn’t quite the same as the print version but it does have many of the same photos. The back cover of the print version has a full-page ad for a large pet care company. The amateur point-and-shoot photo missed the purpose of the business and it also missed everything needed in good photography.
What readers don’t know is that some “normal” sections of a newspaper are also advertorials produced by the ad department and/or outsourced to freelancers. This includes sections for new cars, new homes, gardening, education, investing, travel and any other “special section.” I spent almost two decades at a Toronto daily newspaper and was involved with many advertising supplements.
Often the arrangement for these advertorial sections is that if a business buys an ad, it will receive a glowing editorial about their company. The bigger the ad buy, the bigger the editorial.
Properly produced advertorials do serve a purpose for both consumer and business. So companies should be prepared to take full advantage of these special sections when possible. If no advertorials are currently available, the company should use its web site to publish its own editorial information.
In today’s Globe and Mail advertorial section, few of the featured companies were prepared since much of the photography was amateurishly done: out of focus, poorly exposed, badly composed, crooked buildings, bad Photoshopping.
When producing an advertorial, most newspapers require each featured business to supply their own pictures (note the plural). It’s obvious from this Globe and Mail advertorial that some companies didn’t have more than one photo to offer because the same photo appears in both the editorial and the advertisement for that company. This diminishes the value of the editorial.
Companies need to have business photos on hand, ready for use in press releases, public relations and media handouts. These can be produced over a period of time instead of being shot at the last minute when the need arises.
The necessary business photography to help market a company includes: business portraits of key people, pictures of the office, factory or retail locations, photos of products being manufactured or sold at retail, and employees at work. As much as possible, the photo should have an editorial look to them. Editorial photography is more effective at getting attention and communicating a message than a normal advertising photo.
Half of the photos in this advertorial section failed these basic requirements. That’s probably why the newspaper had to resort to using a cheap stock picture on the cover: none of the supplied photos were suitable for the front page. (I doubt the newspaper decided to help promote Canadian businesses by using a meaningless, cheap stock picture of generic people from England.)
None of the featured companies in this newspaper advertorial section were ready for their close up and all lost the marketing advantage of free front-page coverage.
