We Held a Webinar!
You may have heard that we have partnered up with Graphic Stock recently to bring your a chance to win $5,000. You may have also seen that last week we held a webinar with our very own Design channel editor Alex Walker.
It was our first webinar, and we were pretty happy to see such a great turn out! Sure there may have been a couple of early hiccups which are now hilarious playbacks, regardless Alex did a brilliant job speaking to us all about stock images! In case you missed last weeks webinar, I’ve created a recap from part 2 of his presentation.
3 Tips for Finding the Perfect Image
1. Work on good copy first
Killer copy can make ordinary images great! Now let’s take a look at an example of this, the Volkswagen Print Ad in 1960.
Volkswagen Print Ad (1960)
At first glance, it’s clear that this layout uses a very stock-standard – even boring – car image with the plainest composition you could imagine. But it’s the single-word headline below that is so jarringly brilliant that it forces you to do a mental double-take. A single word. “Lemon”.
After being drawn into reading the copy you learn how a small blemish on the glove-box caused this car to fail VW’s quality testing.
Just to prove how clever they were, Volkswagen’s ad team re-used the same, fairly tedious car image in different way not long after.
At a time when Time Magazine charged $6,000 for a full-page ad, Volkswagen were brave enough to leave most of their page empty, shrinking the car image and running with the simply headline ‘Think small’. In a world of big, glossy cars and big glossy car ads, a simple layout combined with sharp copywriting got amazing cut-through with readers.
In both cases, VW decided to go against current advertising norms and had great success breaking into a very competitive US car market. They didn’t need expensive photo shoots in exotic locations – in fact, the image looks like it could well be from the Beetle drivers manual. The lesson from this example is that of clever copywriting (and some good layout) can make an ordinary image GREAT !
2. Identify the clichés – and break then
Once you have identified the cliché images for your project, then TWIST them…. Bend them… and then BREAK them! That’s right, be unique. Some of the clichés you may be looking for could be the subject matter, camera angles, typography, color or style.
Levi Jeans Ads
Consider this thought. You may have grown up watching your parents wear Levi Jeans, and there’s a high chance you’ve had Levi’s at one stage, you may even be wearing them now. Levi Strauss has been around for 120 years now which makes them an old, old company.
So, how does an old company like Levi Jeans stay young and hip in the eyes of its customers? The standard approach has always been to ‘show young, hip people wearing their denim’. Unfortunately, almost any competitor marketing denim will take the same approach making it hard to get cut through.
To change things up for their ‘black denim’ campaign, Levi sourced a rather prosaic shot of a white sheep flock, and photoshopped in a single black sheep heading the other direction. This ‘stand out from the crowd’ message might have taken 30 minutes to create in Photoshop.
Pedigree Dog Food Ads
How does Pedrigree dog food break the cliché to promote the idea of dog adoption. The obvious approach is to show a sad puppy and ask us to “Please save all the sad puppies” – or help us with our problem.
Pedigree took a less obvious approach by making the pitch all about you and your problems, showing how dog adoption can help your mental health and happiness. A 10-minute photoshop trick changes the meaning of the original image, and the tagline of ‘Take care of yourself and adopt a dog’ delivers the ‘payload’. Clever.
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Source: SitePoint