Using Stock Photography: A Cautionary Tale

The growing popularity and widespread availability of stock photography sites like istockphoto.com and fotolia.com has put the likes of Getty Images and Tony Stone on their ears right along with a great many high quality independent professionals. You can’t blame it all on the stock photo sites. The issue has been compounded by camera phones and flip cameras: everyone things they can take pictures. Right along with the proliferation of images has come a lowering of standards in what viewers will accept as quality. 75 DPI and even blurry images are sometimes acceptable, for the right use.

But once you leave Facebook, businesses still demand professional-like quality but for a beer budget price and that is how we all landed on istockphoto.com. Don’t get me wrong: I use istockphoto.com and several other inexpensive stock photo sites. But it is truly a buyer beware scenario. The risk is that EVERYONE else is using istockphoto.com, too, and thus you’re all using the same images. Case in point: the istockphoto.com guy.

the istockphoto dude

Now be honest: how many different times have you seen and/or used this image? I swear he is everywhere. And as we all know, he can’t possibly work for everyone so now folks have to confess: they used stock photography. 

Stock photos are great but if you’re picking images for the home page of your website (or any other highly trafficked or read location) do you really want an image that everyone else is using? Absolutely not. This is your brand and you need to treat it as such.

So if your web designer talks you into the idea of “faces” on your home page because “viewers are drawn to faces,” do me a favor: check the download popularity of the recommended image and at least try not to select ones that thousands of other users have already picked.

Alternatively, try to break away from the idea of faces on your website. Amazingly stock images of products, locations and the like aren’t nearly as recognizable as stock.

But if you really must have those faces: consider budgeting for original photography. Once you get past the sticker shock, you’ll come to appreciate the value in images that you and only you own. And that way when you put them on your trade show booth, you won’t have to worry about seeing the same image on a booth down the aisle, like I did at a show last night. I think it was this one.

1400 downloads and counting

 

What does it say when UK advertisers spend more on web than TV?

The WSJ reported yesterday that the percent of UK advertising dollars spent on internet advertising has surpassed those spent on TV advertising. Surprised? I was. That’s a huge difference from the US where reportedly internet advertising still captures only 13% of f all advertising dollars.

So what does that say about their marketing efforts? Is it a result of the mediocre quality and limited opportunities to advertise during UK television programming? Or is it just because their advertisers have become savvier about their spend?

Internet advertising represents a much more targeted opportunity to pursue eyeballs. While you may get several hundred television stations from your cable or satellite provider, that same fat line is bringing you jillions of internet advertising opportunities. The question is how accurate and successful you can be with those internet ad dollars.

For reaching mainstream consumers, Yahoo, Google and Bing do a good job of allowing you to buy search sensitive advertising opportunities as well ads within their contextual network. Facebook is quickly gaining in this playground, too, but what about the other seemingly limitless advertising opportunities alongside non search related sites where display ad opps are available by the month or the click?

Some of these are fantastic (and cheap) opps for reaching a difficult to target market but the effort is still significantly less sophisticated that the decision making model developed by the big agencies for TV. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t follow the ways of English advertisers. Heck, be a pioneer. I’m sure by this time next year that 13% will have ramped up significantly. But be wary. The science behind it is still developing and you don’t want to find that you’ve bought a big ticket campaign and wasted your previous advertising dollars on something that isn’t bringing the promised results.

What Makes a Good Testimonial?

We regularly capture content for clients that is fashioned into a press release or case study but one of the things I see clients struggling with is capturing really good testimonials.

All too often clients will want to post testimonials on their website or in their newsletter from favored and happy clients. The problem is that most of these unsolicited testimonies are pretty weak and usually pay compliment to an individual on your staff and not to your organization as a whole. “Suzy is great to work with,” is valuable customer feedback when it comes time to writing Suzy’s review but doesn’t belong in any of your other customer or prospect communications. For testimonials to be valuable, they need to be specific to your organization, product or service offering and ideally include a metric like ROI or time to delivery.

In a post on GadPedal.com today on this same subject he goes so far as to put a limit on the word count of your testimonials as just SIX. I think six will be a struggle for some but it definitely looks good on the web, in the margin of printed material or pushed out as a Tweet. The challenge to you will of course be to provide quality in those six words.

In Honor of National Punctuaion Day: The Proper Use of an Ellipsis

Sometime earlier this year I came across a reference to today being National Punctuation Day and quickly put a reminder in my calendar. It kind of sounds like National Underwater Basket Weaving Day or some other nonsensical holiday but for the amount of time I spend answering questions about proper use of punctuation, I decided it was a prime opportunity to share.

For the un-indoctrinated, an ellipsis is those three dots you see in punctuation and not the oval you drew in high school Trig (that is an ellipse).

When used properly, an ellipsis indicates an intentional omission of a word or phrase or an intentional pause in thinking or speech. Most writers use this punctuation properly when composing their thoughts but poorly execute it as punctuation mark.

An ellipsis is always three periods (dots) and never four or five. As a punctuation mark, it is always followed by a space but never preceded by one.

There should be no spaces between the periods either. To make this easy, the most recent versions of Microsoft Word will actually adjust the formatting for you to ensure proper spacing. Try typing four periods in a row and you’ll see the difference.

Because an ellipsis is designed to provide emphases, it is important to avoid overuse. When a writer places one in every sentence or many times on the page it usually signifies that they’re too lazy to complete the thought or too inconsiderate to provide the details.

Inappropriate Advertising in the Miami vs. FSU Football Game

You don’t have to be a football fan or even an FSU alum to appreciate the really poor taste exhibited by the media buyers for Monday night’s game on ESPN. What were they thinking allowing a movie about the murdering of sorority girls sponsor a game at a university where not so many years ago Ted Bundy took lives from the Chi-Omega house?

I’m fairly certain that the media buyer probably didn’t attend FSU and didn’t understand the insensitivity of the context of this placement but somebody should have been watching. This is a great example of why national buys and national messaging doesn’t always work in individual markets. A local test of this ad would certainly have raised objections from this media audience or at least in this market. But perhaps in an era of tightening budgets and hurry-t0-market campaigns, people aren’t taking the time to think and that is a problem.

It goes back to the old adage of one happy customer will tell another but one UNHAPPY customer will tell three or five or ten (depending on which survey you read).

How many irate FSU alumni will it take to prevent this ad from running again? Or perhaps prevent this movie from seeing theaters in Tallahassee?

I’m not certain and that isn’t really isn’t the point of this post. The point is that marketing mavens in other mass media markets don’t know your customer in your backyard the way that you do. That means if you’re a large brand, you need to take the time to localize. And if you’re a small business, you have a leg up on the large brand who won’t take the time or expense to be authentic in your space.

Happy marketing and Go Noles!