In 2019, consumerism is king. It’s undeniable. Whether the sales are on Amazon, Facebook, ebay or in the ever fleeting yet still powerful brick and mortar store, consumption has never been higher. If you run a business, big or small, it is absolutely critical to differentiate yourself in the market. In this article, I will cover a bevy of topics regarding professional commercial photography; why it’s essential for sales, what kind of photography you should have in your marketing portfolio, how to find the right photographer for your campaign and how your investment in a skilled photographer will actually increase your bottom line. 

Photography: the ultimate sales tool

Let me get it out right off the bat and it may seem obvious at first. Photography is the ultimate sales tool. Why, might you ask? It’s simple. A customer cannot unsee an image and whether they acknowledge it or not, that image has entered into their brain, perhaps momentarily, and that’s the point. Another powerful sales tool is video and while I’ll never make a case that video isn’t an important tool for your campaign (I make a large percentage of my living shooting video afterall), video requires a critical issue that can’t be understated; you have to click play and turn the sound on your device to watch it. How often are you scrolling through Facebook or Twitter and see a video and continue scrolling without playing it? Many social media platforms have cleverly bypassed this issue by implementing an auto-play feature, however, this still requires you to turn the sound on and dedicate those precious seconds of your time to pay attention. Often times, it takes a few seconds to get a point across in a video and if your audience scrolls past before getting to the core of your message, did they really see your ad at all? 

On the flip side, photography can’t be scrolled past in the same manner. A well conceived photograph is self contained in that it tells you everything you need to know all within its borders. If you run a cleaning service, an image of one of your employees vacuuming a carpet tells the consumer all they need to know. They are quickly reminded of the value that hiring such a service would add to their life. Boom. Done. If you sell a beverage, even a simple shot of the bottle or can will drive a consumer to recognize they are thirsty. The list goes on. The point is, photography is the instant solution in an ever increasing era of shrinking attention spans. 

Another reason photography is a powerful tool is in its versatility. We see commercial photography everywhere; billboards, flyers, social media adverts, websites, magazines, store windows, pamphlets, etc. A single photograph can be used across all of these platforms. Such adaptability is both cost effective and essential and if you are debating whether to go with video or photography, choose photography everytime.

The many different styles of commercial photography

If you take a stroll down instagram and take note of how brands are sharing their products or services with you, you may notice a variety of image styles. Some may appear to be exceptionally high end work while others may have the appearance of possibly coming from an end user’s cell phone. If the company is of a respectable stature, it is likely that all of these photographs were shot by a professional photographer and conceptualized by a team of creative minds at an ad agency. The reason for the variation is that they want to create a mix of larger-than-life polished advertisements as well as a depiction of the experience of the end user. 

The stand out high end photography is almost always the work you see in certain advertisement platforms such as billboards, website banners, magazine spreads and store displays. Such shoots are usually outsourced from an ad agency to a photographer who specializes in such elaborate lighting designs and compositions that are geared towards their intended platforms. These shoots are complex and require a large team of professionals taking exhaustive measures to insure that every detail is fine tuned to have the impact on their intended audience (ill dive into intended audiences below) that they intend. On such shoots, you may see, at a minimum, a creative director, a photographer, a lighting technician, multiple clients, monitors, lights strategically hitting every corner of the set with elaborate treatments fixed upon them, cameras set upon specialized studio stands that can be up to 10 feet tall and are attached to computers that are manned by a trained professional that is scouring the image for any inconsistencies in lighting. There may be cables running every which way in an organized river of electricity and a youthful and energetic individual carrying cups of coffee to each of the team members. There is a palpable hierarchy that anyone and their mothers would pick up on. Anyone in front of the camera is a model that went through an extensive casting process and has signed away usage of their likeness for a predetermined time frame ranging from a single year all the way to forever, commonly referred to as “in perpetuity”. Likewise, the licensing of the final images of these shoots is also subject to a set time frame. If the company chooses, they can offer a full buyout of the images or they can purchase a window of time in which the photo can be used. When that time is up, they can opt to renew the license and must pay the predetermined fees to the photographer to continue using the images. It isn’t uncommon for a shoot like this to only deliver one complex photo from a 16 hour shoot day, though usually there will be at least three. 

The other aforementioned type of photography, which shouldn’t be overlooked or trivialized, is far simpler. The goal of such a shoot is not to make the product or service appear larger than life. In fact, its purpose is to do just the opposite of that. The formal term for the intent of this type of photography is called “elevated authenticity”. It is a key tool that makes the product appear to be something attainable and experientially understood by just about anyone as is most commonly seen on social media platforms. It is to appear as if it was shot by a humble customer. Don’t be mistaken; such a photograph is still a fine tuned piece of creative design and requires, albeit smaller in number, team of professionals to execute. An example of photos that follow this style can be seen in a series I did along with my friends at Denver’s The Integer Group. Their client was the burger chain, Red Robin. Our shot list was focused on their menu items and often times was as simple as snagging a photograph to appear like we were in the restaurant. To hold the burgers, we chose the person who had the nicest looking hands that day and took a close up of the burgers.  On the set of an elevated authenticity shoot, you may see a small selection of lights, a single creative director and often times other members of the agency doing tasks that entire departments on the high end sets would be delegated to. Despite the simplicity, these shoots still have the skillful eye of a professional photographer insuring that light falls on the product properly and their is precision in the framing. On such a shoot, it is common to accomplish 10 or more photos that can be utilized for months worth of social media campaigns. 

A well balanced advertising campaign will contain a wide selection of both extensive high end photography as well as elevated authenticity shots as both have completely different platforms. If your intention is to make your website a strong area of your sales force, you will want to focus more on the high end. If you have a goal to build up a library of assets for a strong social media presence, you will want to execute a series of elevated authenticity shoots. In the end, stronger business’s marketing strategies contain a healthy assortment of both categories. 

Finding the right photographer

I have delved deep into the subject of finding the perfect photographer in another article titled “The Expert vs. The Amature”. In the article I discuss the nuances of photography and what an expert will do to see that the shoot is as perfect as humanly possible. Here, however, I will go into why not all expert photographers are the same. This is another area that may seem inherently obvious but since it contains important distinctions between areas of expertise, I will elaborate on why specifically hiring an expert commercial photographer is critical. 

There are many areas of expertise in photography and a plethora of masters within each of these domains in just about any major metropolitan area in the world. While just about every photographer understands the fundamentals that are involved in each category of the artform, almost none of them are masterful at all of them. Take for instance, the approach a real estate photographer takes to capturing a nice home that is about to hit the market. Their camera bag is full of all the right tools for the job. They will have the proper wide angle lens, a portable yet durable tripod, a strobe and trigger system that allows them to fire the shutter of the camera while wandering the room with the strobe handheld to fill every nook and cranny with just the right amount of light. They’d even have a box of booties for their shoes to prevent tracking any dirt into the house that very likely was recently detail cleaned just for their services. Once the shoot is done, they have an unbeatable command of the post processing procedures to assemble all of the photos to create absolutely perfect shot. They multiple shots from the same vantage point and select the perfect lighting within each zone to composite the images together to make the most impact. They do this efficiently and consistently every single time. So much so, in fact, that it has become second nature. When it comes time to deliver the final assets to the client, they already have a firm grasp of what the digital marketplace needs (aspect ratio, file size, transfer protocols,etc.) that the real estate agent knows that this task has been handled with precision. 

Despite this photographer having a perfect portfolio within this given niche, they would likely be akin to a fish out of water on something like a product photography shoot. It is unlikely that this individual would have invested in the resources to execute a pristine product shot, such as the lighting tools, the proper lens focal lengths, the post processing skills or the deliverable asset needs that a seasoned product photographer would have. Even simple, but often overlooked, items such as little wedges of wood to prop set decorations up may not be something they would have.

I chose the example of a “real estate photographer” not as a pejorative or even a dig on the profession; I personally have tried and failed at a number of real estate shoots. It is simply used to describe the amount of focus and expertise required within a given subset of the photography trade. Every category carries with it unexpected complexities and minutiae that must have a strong backing of experiencing to overcome. Therefore, choosing a specialist within the field is critical. Afterall, you wouldn’t hire a furniture manufacturer to build you a house despite the fact that both involve elaborate woodworking. 

The undeniable ROI of commercial photography

Time after time, I run into clients, usually newer or smaller companies, that are afraid to invest too much money into a photographer. This is perfectly natural but somewhat of a fallacy. Photography, as I have stated above, is one of the most powerful sales tools that exists. In implementing, for example, a social media campaign, we can track the analytics of each post made and fine tune the approach to hit our market perfectly. In doing so, you can track the impact a single photograph has and, in the process, begin the process to creating a healthy return on your photography investment.

We live in an amazing time. While the concerns of the Big Brother or 1984 nature of social media course through the zeitgeist, advertisers, on the other hand, are having a field day. Every single place we go to, every single post we make or every single term we google search is tracked and compiled to create the perfect breakdown of who we are. In fact, these systems are so effective and honed-in that the big box store, Target, caused a father to learn his daughter was pregnant. The story goes as such; a young girl had gotten pregnant and was doing research to better educate herself on what to expect. The analytics system took the keywords she searched on web browsers and triggered a targeted campaign of print ads sent to the house she shared with her father. He grew angry that they were sending such targeted ads to his young child and wanted to know why they felt they had the need to share such material with her. He called Target headquarters only to learn that such a campaign is usually started based on searched keywords. His daughter then spilled the beans that she was expecting a baby.  While this sounds like the product of a dystopian timeline, the lesson to be learned is that these tools are extremely powerful and accurate. By harnessing the power of these analytics, you too can begin tooling a photography campaign to reach the exact person you are trying to. 

More recently, during a 12 hour outage of facebook’s image hosting platform, it was revealed how powerful the artificial intelligence was that processes and analyzes the images that are uploaded. It is able to create keywords based on what it perceives to be in a given photograph. During the outage, the only thing that would show up to those browsing facebook was a blank frame that would usually hold a photograph and small fine print text that read something such as “image may contain tennis rackets, people playing tennis, a tennis court”. This revelation only further indicates the power of social media advertising. 

Let’s say you make amazing gardening tools. If you created a campaign that centers around a series of photographs of your tools being used by, for instance, a middle aged woman, you can tell google or facebook to have your images show up when people who have a history of searching for things such as “best gardening soil” or “how to grow daisies in Colorado”. Since we know the AI behind the scenes can tell what your photographs contain, it can then target with laser like accuracy the exact middle aged woman who may be in the market for new gardening tools. By tracking the results and interactions (if they clicked on the link in your ad for instance), you can begin focusing on what photographs and keywords are driving what kind of person into more and more of the kind of interactions that result in more sales. After a short while, you will have an in depth understanding of what subjects should be the center of attention in a photograph and use photography as the driving force behind your ever increasing bottom line.