Having a huge archive of documented material is the BIGGEST money saver in all of marketing for a business. And barely anyone is doing it. And that’s great news for photographers and videographers going forward.
Back when I was mostly just a freelance photographer, I’d get paid to shoot photos for a small business, and then see that they’d never really put them to use. It was kind of frustrating, because I kept seeing it over and over, businesses spending money on a photographer or for video but never really doing anything with any of it. There’s so much waste in that. One single image can be used in a ton of different ways for a business: website, print, social media, square, black and white, with a graphic, however. And it sounds expensive to hire people to help create media around your business, ad infinitum, but a little bit can go a long way. Make a long video, cut it into clips! Shoot a bunch of photos, put them in a video, use them for all kinds of stuff.
I see a future where most major businesses or businesses that want to become major have their own in-house video and photo team. In-house marketing feels like the future. The future is about personalization, and it’s tough to outsource that to an agency of people that don’t know you or your business intimately. They can make a good ad about your business, but they can’t tell your story as well as you can.
Photography or making video, used to be a real, employed job. Now it’s basically gig economy work largely. There are almost no truly “employed” photographers left aside from remnants of the old world. But I think that could possibly change. I think it has to change as our consumption habits change.
Remember what I said in Photography is Dead? Social media content is now competing with Succession and Game of Thrones because we have a finite amount of time to spend consuming things. If you make something good and engaging, you can take eyeballs from something that has a multi-million dollar budget.
We avoid ads like the plague. We pay extra on our streaming subscriptions, we hit the skip 30 seconds button on our podcast apps, and we scroll right past ads on Instagram. We have been such an ad saturated society for so long now, that we have a sixth sense for when something is an ad or not. We stop scrolling, however, when we sense some authenticity in something, whether it looks like a lower quality video that your friend shot on your phone, or if there’s a good hook that seeks to actually offer you something in exchange for your time.
I’ve been dipping into a creative consulting of sorts since early this year, and it’s going pretty well. I have a few clients that I help to craft interesting content using my taste and technical skills. But also, I spend a ton of time with these businesses and know them very well. You know what makes that easier? When they’ve recorded their history. When they have a pile of real stuff around their business, not just pristine “ad content”. Because the stuff people want to see is real.
Every business needs their own photography or video library around what they do. Businesses that don’t get stuck using impersonal, sterile “stock” media that really has nothing to do with them and makes them blend in with everyone else.
This is good news for people who specialize in use of these “documenting tools” like photography and videography: You’re going to be super important for years to come. I believe entrepreneurs and business owners are beginning to see the importance in an archive of photos and videos about them and their business. Because it actually saves them money in the long run. Ads only get more expensive as time goes on, but if you’re putting out your story organically, momentum builds, and even if you still have ad spend, your advertising gets cheaper because you have all that organic reach.
Maybe product photography is being replaced by AI, but AI can’t really document a person’s real, actual life and experience. AI can make the documenting process easier and lower cost for sure, but those who can document aren’t going anywhere.
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For the 15 years I’ve been a photographer, I’ve been building an archive. Now, in my videos and any project I work on, I have years and years of work to pull from. It’s crazy, actually, I can even insert flashbacks of sorts in these videos…Like back when I was traveling for the Small Town Photo Project…or even farther back when I worked at Art Warehouse.
Back when I worked at Art Warehouse, we built a “stock photography” library of our own that could be used to sell commercial prints to hospitals, hotels, and other commercial spaces. That stock image library gave us enormous power AND value.
Then when I went out on my own starting the Small Town Photo Project (insert flashback of the Small Town Photo Project), I realized that there was a ton of value in building a library of images for specific places. That was the goal: Make it easier for people to get images for their town, not just to hang in offices, but also for web and branding use. That has now transformed into Anderson Views, a website that has a growing bank of images just for my town of Anderson, SC.
Fortunately, during the Small Town Photo Project process (which was a pretty grueling time of driving miles and miles to capture photos in these growing places) I had the foresight to document much of it with a vlog. That helped people understand the story of what I was doing, but now, I can use it for stuff like this very podcast, after the fact. I can cut it all up and use it for whatever, at any time. Not only was I building a library of images to sell in various ways, but I was creating content for myself for the future.
The fact is, I could stop making things now, and I would have plenty of stuff to post on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Youtube Shorts for the next few years.
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During the early iteration of this podcast, Photography is Dead, I talked about how important it is to tell a story with our cameras in order to create value in our work and take them a step above what you see on Adobe Stock or places like that. A picture of a waterfall is cool, but why did you take a photo of a waterfall? Why were you there? What was the journey to the waterfall like? We’ve all see plenty of waterfall photos, and I can find some cool ones for free on Pexels, so why is yours valuable?
But the fact is, every business should be thinking this way as well, no matter if you have a deli, a coffee shop, or an insurance agency. One way to tell your story would be to simply show them, by documenting the process of how you got there in the first place.
I live in a small town. Small towns are often…let’s just say…behind bigger locales in a lot of ways, but eventually time catches up. Eventually, everything comes to a small town that was in a bigger city years ago. Not just products, but also, ideas. Many businesses that start are focused on the work of starting a business itself (as it should be, by the way). It’s a frenzy of chaos and stress, so it’s not on top of mind to have someone there with a camera making sure to document it all. Also, it can be expensive.
2 episodes ago I talked about how it’s about to be the golden age of photography and creativity: We are going to need photographers more than ever. BECAUSE, what’s happening now is entrepreneurs in bigger cities are making the investment of documenting the process along the way. Gary Vaynerchuk has 33 full-time employees filming him and packaging the content they film for him which is being used to get his story and message out there EVERY SINGLE DAY. Oh, and organically, I might add. He’s a client of his own business, VaynerMedia, and then his content is also helping grow his businesses. He has an enormous archive and proof of everything he does, which only helps to build tons of trust in him and value in what he’s saying.
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This strategy of just being everywhere isn’t a new one. Lawyers use this strategy all the time. Personal injury lawyers are trying to cast the absolute widest net they can, so they just make commercials, put up billboards, create radio jingles, so that they are the first name that pops into your head when you get into a car wreck or need to take legal action in some way. When you think about “entrepreneurship” you now think GaryVee and Alex Hormozi because they are carpet bombing the internet with their points of view all the time.
This is just one strategy. Honestly, probably the most maximalist strategy. These are super extreme, BUT if you’re capturing tons of photos and video of what you do and documenting, it gives you a lot of options.
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recommendations:
-Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom- I play maybe one or two video games a year, and this was the move this year. Video games are an enormous time suck, but I feel like every once in a while devoting the time to solve puzzles opens new pathways to thinking or creativity. It’s problem solving, but in a different way. Most of the problems I’m solving day to day are work related, so fun problems to solve can be quite useful. Also, this game is amazing. There’s so much to explore that it will offer tons of to do for months to come. I’m pretty addicted to this game at the moment.
-Summer movie season- We haven’t had a real summer movie season since 2019, but 2023 is popping off. I love the movies, and used to go multiple times a month in the before times, but for the past couple years there just hasn’t been that much to see. I kicked it off with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 which was great (I’ve liked it the more time goes on. I think I liked it more than the first Guardians if I’m being honest.) And there’s something worth seeing coming out now every week or two for the summer. Many of these movies may not work or may even be bad, but the spirit of summer movie season reminds me of a simpler time in my life. Highly recommend spending the summer at the movies.
That’s it for this week! Thanks for listening and/or watching, and I’ll see you next week!