The business side of photography
A journalism site posted an article titled “Has social media finally killed the press release?”
Here’s a truism: if a headline is in the form of a question that can be answered with a yes or no, the answer is no. If the answer was yes, the headline would be in the form of a statement not a question.
Social media makes it fast, easy and free to send information to the masses. But that was never the purpose of a press release.
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Today I received an e-mail from someone who runs a small clothing store. The subject title of the e-mail was, “I was mislead by a photographer.”
This person had hired a photographer to shoot some advertising pictures for their children’s clothing store.
It appears that the photographer didn’t deliver any usable images or even the promised number of pictures. The photographer also didn’t deliver the promised, model-released pictures of children wearing the store’s clothing. The business has nothing it can use.
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Effective photography for corporate marketing has two general types of images: those with story appeal and those that demonstrate something. The former is used to convey an idea or emotion and the latter is used to deliver a fact. The two types can overlap.
Pictures with story appeal are said to have human interest. These images are usually editorial because editorial photography is considered by the public to be more interesting and trustworthy. Conveying a message through human interest is always persuasive because this photography creates an emotional response in the viewer.
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If your company still uses cheap stock pictures and you enjoy irony then keep reading.
Last month, McSweeney’s published “This is a Generic Brand Video”, a satirical piece by Kendra Eash about the generic branding used by some companies.
Many businesses today use meaningless, generic stock photos and stock video. These companies may think they’re sending a strong message to their customers and building a unique corporate image but they’re fooling only themselves. Everyone sees stock images for what they really are: just a quick way to cut corners and save a few bucks.
Now the irony.
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When a company decides to dip its business toes into corporate photography, the first photo project is usually either business portraits or pictures of the office. This is all well and good but it may help to have an overall plan for the photography well before a camera shutter button is clicked. Corporate photography should do more than just fill empty spaces on a page.
Sure, the easy marketing plan is, “we want more customers to buy more stuff.” But that’s too vague to be of any help. If you work things backward and break it down to specific steps, you can get it to work:
How do you get more customers to buy more stuff?
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People know which pictures they like but they may not understand why. Few people understand the art and craft of photo editing.
There are few publications today that still have a photo editor. It would be surprising if any non-media business has a photo editor. Instead, photographers are left to edit their own work and then someone at the client-end selects the pictures they like to look at.
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If you made products for digital cameras, what kind of camera would you show on your web site to help market your products?
If you’re Eye-Fi, which makes WiFi-enabled memory cards, you would use an old film camera from last century. [Sorry, the link has gone dead. Screengrab below]. And to make it worse, you would state “The power of WiFi for the camera you love.”
