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.

Increase in Advertising Spending = Recovering Economy or Desperation?

About six months ago I started encouraging clients to take advantage of the pull back in advertising spend to make their dollar go further by taking advantage of greatly reduced rates. My clients don’t do a lot of display but the same mantra held true for most of the available media at the time.

Over the summer I noticed an uptick in marketing spend in my business serving the SMB space and subsequently confirmed the same was true with my counterparts serving the medium enterprise and global corporation space. Conjecture might say this signals a turn in the economy, but is that true?

The WSJ reported this morning that the dental market is seeing a 10% drop on average in patient billings largely due to unemployment rate. People without dental insurance stop going and those high brow vanity treatments don’t seem as important when we’re counting our pennies. The article goes on to describe how dentists are having to get creative with their marketing efforts and spend less time seeing patience and more time recruiting them. The old reminder postcards aren’t bringing patients in as fast and thus dentists are trying the same tricks as everyone else: email campaigns and twitter.

So perhaps the increase in marketing spend is just a sign that business are finally having to do what we marketing folks have told them all along: focus on your best prospects, show love to your best clients, identify to your competitive advantage and then promote it in more ways than buying one ValPak envelope a year and putting your initials on the door?

I think what in fact what is happening is that certain businesses are preparing to thrive. They’re establishing a robust infrastructure, staking their claim on their space and working harder to protect their brand. It’s not just a marketing investment that will help them succeed. It’s their overall investment in their business from people to technology that is helping them ramp up and prepare to take market share from the competition who instead of investing has squeezed every available dime out of their business and hidden it under the mattress.

Make Marketing More Affordable with These Cost-Cutting Ideas

Yesterday I overheard the 6AM broadcaster on NPR talking about what the venture capitalists would be looking for at the business show going on in San Francisco this week. The point he drove home, no big surprise, was that strategist who were coming up with ways to businesses do more with less would be the ones most likely to get funded. This is a common mantra among many service providers, especially among those in the IT industry. But if you had to actually detail HOW you help your clients do more with less, could you do it? Take 5 minutes and come up with 3 ideas. Now what do you get?

This is a conversation we have regularly with clients, in our efforts to help them figure out how to get more from their marketing budget. Our answer typically revolves around looking for as many possible different ways to re-purpose content so that the cost of a single project is spread out over multiple deliverables. Here’s my list:

1. Press Releases used to be just for press but the truth is that your customers, partners and investors want to read them, too. After you pitch a release and put on the wire, don’t forget to place it on your website. Next consider linking to it from your monthly newsletter. Print out a few copies and place them on the receptionist desk (if you have foot traffic in your office), print out a few more copies and hand them to sales reps (if they are likely to become foot traffic someplace else) then consider emailing a copy to the prospect you spoke with yesterday, the guy who won’t take your call and your banker (it is always good to elevate your self-worth with your banker).

2. Don’t limit the recipients of your postcard to the folks on the mailing list that you just rented. Seed your list with customers, too. Carry them in your briefcase or purse when you go to meetings this week and hand them out INSTEAD OF business cards. Get a PDF version of the card and share with your sales force. Show them how to add it as a thumbnail to their autosignature.

3. Newsletters should live all month long. Whether you email them or direct mail them, don’t assume that because we’ve passed the first of the month that they are no longer newsworthy. Keep hard copies in an acrylic display in your conference room. Add the current issue to your press kit. Upload the articles individually to your on-line knowledgebase. Post them in an archive to your on-line newsroom.

More ideas coming later. It’s lunch time now so I’m going to practice these ideas on the folks at my lunch meeting.

Plans to Reach Your Target Market (Preparing for 2008, Part 4)

If you can’t profile your target, then you can’t make smart marketing investments. If your business is new, look at the competition for a profile of the most profitable part of their business.

If you have existing clients, figure out which ones are most profitable. Just because 50% of your current business comes from a single source or type of client doesn’t mean that you want more of them. Continue to use the same marketing tools and messages to promote your business and you’ll just get more of them. And as hard as it may be to step away from what you know, sometimes you have to take that leap of faith to get the change you want from your business.

Your best prospects are not EVERYONE. They are people or businesses who live, work, do, believe and breathe different things every day. The more specific you can be in your identification of your one or more best prospects, the better marketing decisions you will be able to make.

It may sound great when the ad sales rep tells you they reach tens of thousands of women every month if you need to sell to women, right? Not if the women they are reaching are the wrong age or income, live in the wrong geography or have the wrong socioeconomic status. It is not just about female consumers. The same argument could be made for a vehicle that reaches hundreds of CEOs, etc.

Once you have an understanding of your audience, you are that much better prepared to evaluate the merit of individual opportunities that come your way.