Reusing the same stock photos as everyone else is far too common. Here’s where to discover new visual asset pipelines to create better custom content.
The saying today that everyone is a content creator belies the fact that the titanic slug of imagery that oozes through the internet and powers the half-trillion dollar marketing industry can all be traced back to just a few sources. Thats our visual supply chain, and its in critical disrepair.
In an age of more platforms, more channels, more formats, and the need to publish at blistering speed on all of them, good visuals are vital. Their authenticity, from the feelings they evoke to the people they feature, can be the difference between an ad being clicked or an account being followed. But if you arent considering how yours are sourced, they can repel just as easily as they attract.
Every marketer today needs to be asking, Where do my visuals come from and what are they actually saying? As Ive found through my research, the story isnt always clear.
A Deal with the Thumbs-Up Devil
The first tool in the visual marketing kit is the stock photo. From journalists at the BBC to the editorial team at IBM, nearly everyone draws from the massive, royalty-free databases of the top 30 or so stock photography sites. These obviate the need for your social media team to, say, hire a photographer to snap a shot of someone in every time you write about a cyberattack. But the photos also get used by the same people in the same spacesa lot.
On , its first 400,000 photos were downloaded an average of 775 times each. You may not think this would pose a high risk of you posting the same photo as someone else anywhere in the world. But those downloads arent evenly distributed; in fact, the top photos receive a disproportionate number of downloads and have been used millions of times.
That means if you come across a photo, it’s likely because its a featured photo on one of these sites, and its featured because a lot of people are using it. Now, layer in the fact that a photo thats relevant for you is also likely relevant for your competitor and its actually quite likely that youre scraping the bottom of the same shallow bucket. Some stock photo models are so overused they have their own .
Consumers notice reuse of a well-worn photo and can suss out which ones are stock. Consider the photo below: Can you tell which smile is fake?
If you guessed the one on the left, congratulations! You can spot stock. Thats because all of us are wired with machinery to detect what the psychologist termed micro expressions. These are tiny tells”like someones orbicularis oculi muscle not activating when they smile, which triggers a subconscious alarm that informs us that were being deceived. This is the source of the notorious stock effect: It looks manufactured because it is. The emotions are fake and every detail is curated to create a distinctly un-curated vibe, , which makes it all feel curated. If these are the sort of visuals you use to tell a story on Instagram, for example, you are subconsciously telling followers to be suspicious.
Not all companies rely entirely on stock photography, but it accounts for an increasing share of imagery. Brands with in-house production teams with the raging demand for visuals. If you think of your companys visual assets as a pool, the demands of digital publishing are a piano-sized drain.
There’s also the issue of stock photo subjects being painfully, overwhelmingly white.
Its possible to find empowered, diverse women in stock photography, but its a real slog to get there, in an article about a partnership between Dove, Getty and a female-led agency to shoot diverse stock and undo some of the perceptual harm wrought by years of editors and algorithms.
Most stock images are also predominantly heteronormative. and the result is hardly representative of the world today, to say nothing of evolving social norms. Stock repositories also come up short when portraying workplaces with the accuracy and specificity that customers demand.
On the military social network , there are daily jokes about brands trying to advertise U.S. veteran discounts while using a stock photo of a Russian tank. Or consider this where scientists ridicule stock science photos that involve improbably-bright colored liquids and unfathomable procedures. The Twitter hashtag is a gold mine for such gaffes.
And if all the above doesnt make you queasy about stock, how these platforms obtain those photos might.
A Highly Edited Echo Chamber
Stock photos are there because someone somewhere with a camera is trying to make a quick buck (just kidding: contributors are often ) by showing you something you expect to see. Contributors follow and anticipate news cycles to know what will be in demand. A news story about a drought-induced avocado shortage, for instance, can trigger an avalanche of avocado-related submissions. Stock photos are art imitating lifecreators capture photos that they think will be hot. Its sort of like betting on stocks, writes .
These multi-sided marketplaces are essentially squeezing sellers (the photographers) into doing the unpaid work of anticipating what buyers want. A contributor has to deliver many photos in the hopes of being paid for one or two. Its like Uber, but if the drivers are only paid for every hundredth ride.
There is also human-induced bias as a result of hand-curation. Each stock photo site has human editors (who are sometimes preceded by an algorithmic sniff-test) who select photos based on what people are searching for on their platform. Some, like Shutterstock, to anticipate where these trends are headed and put out calls to creators. This drives everything toward the meanmale CEOs in suits smiling at computersand makes for a massively warped view of the world. It is not at all the type of market that caters to the long tailthats yousearching for a photo that represents your brand, fits your aesthetic and gets your industry right.
By definition, one cannot build a brand on stock unless you happen to sell stock photos.
What’s a Marketer to Do?
Marketers need to find new, less troubled visual asset pipelines. Some stock photo sites are innovating, though slowly. If you , you get a surprising array of diversity. That is the result of . Many of the bigger brands are launching offshoot brands to produce stock that doesnt feel like it, which have received some positive press but are, quixotically, still stock.
Perhaps a reversion to the 1980s is in order? There are many marketing and advertising agencies whose teams used to produce most of all marketing imagery before the internet. They certainly have the skills, equipment and expertise. But they too, like in-house production teams, are groaning under the .
Four content pieces per year has turned into 4,000 and budgets have not gone up, said Brad Jakeman, then-president of PepsiCo, at an event a few years ago. Agency prices havent exactly dropped to match. For teams running high-volume ads on Facebook, where imagery trends and tastes change every week, agencies with long project timelines have been pushed out of the picture.
There are automatic photo-generation tools, which draw photos from your brands social media feeds. But user-generated content (UGC) suffers from the issue that most stock content does: Its not always high quality and rarely consistent. And if its from influencers, its the influencers brandnot yours.
Go Custom
So heres the solution: Make your own photos. Rather than dip into shared buckets, marketers at leading brands such as GE and Carlsberg are increasingly building their own. Some are commissioning entire custom photo and video libraries of their locations, products, people or customers that the entire business can draw fromand which is rights-managed or royalty-free and on-brand. See the example below, a photo shot by custom content photographer Blake Bronstad, who pointed me in this direction.
The infrastructure that makes this economical are what are known as visual content creation platforms, which constitute a booming category within the . These platforms harness the same forces that create the demand for all this imagerymillions of people networked togetherto create it. They curate networks of geographically-distributed photographers and producers who work on contract.
Custom content platforms can afford serious advantages. Distributed photographers means less need to pay for plane tickets. Software means its possible for a team of one to manage dozens of projects. Contract work means the service is pay-per-use, and a large pool of creators means projects are done in weeks, not months.
Take , which relies on a network of 800,000 photographers, models, producers and videographers. These contractors are on call and notified of projects through an app. Snapwire manages shoots through a team of project managers who act as a sort of outsourced agency, but the company also has an API to more or less automate the process. This is how the food delivery app DoorDash is able to produce an endless stream of high quality photos for hundreds of thousands of restaurants. When a restaurant signs up, it triggers a project. Its also how The Royal Bank of Canada produced a library of Canada-specific photos (no pesky Golden Gate Bridges in the background) and how TAG Heuer found two models for a high-end nautical-themed photo shoot.
With custom, all usual constraints arent there, Snapwire CEO Chad Newell said in an interview. You can coordinate a global shoot with dozens of photographers all around the world, featuring your product, before your next campaign launches. That sort of speed, accuracy, and scale just wasnt possible before.
The great advantage of custom visuals is that they are, by definition, on-brand. But marketers can also rely on local experts. A common project on Snapwire is for a brand to ask locals to snap iconic locations that reflect their community. If that sort of authenticity sells, as Snapwire claims it does, it may be worth the expense of customwhich my research shows might be on-par with the cost of purchasing stock.
Stock photo companies make notoriously fat margins. Eighty percent of a stock photo sale goes to the platform, . Collectively, stock platforms $4 billion per year selling photos that range from $30 to $500 depending on file size. Thanks to a lack of overhead, custom visual content platforms can often get that cost down to as little as $150 per asset.
Custom is not a cure-all. In-house teams with a studio for high-volume product shoots have their place. Agencies, with their promotional resources and creative expertise, have their place. UGC has its place. But for a surprising number of scenarios, it offers an upside.
What Does the Future Hold?
Perhaps one day well exclusively use machine-generated content, if the popularity of the siteis any indication. It uses an algorithm to generate a composite face from many real photos. The site has used a similar method to generate 100,000 photos that are free for use for attribution. You can try them out.
But until artificial photos cross the uncanny valley and do more than generate headshots, custom content creation is a bet lots of marketers are happily taking. Its created based on their designs; can feature their product, customers or locations; is relatively fast; and most importantly, its of their brand. If it involves actors, they likely have more context and preparation than stock models asked to trapeze through a rapid-fire series of stiff poses. And its not markedly different in cost, while being much higher pay for the photographer.
So what do your visuals say about you? Hopefully something much more profound than a bunch of people in suits with unconvincing grins .
Lead image by Blake Bronstad.
Chris co-founded (formerly Find A Way Media)an upscale content studio that specializes in clear and precise writing for B2B marketers. Amateur historian, aspiring outdoorsman, occasional baker. Join his newsletter for workplace writing wisdom: