What those behind the camera think about when they create their brand
Is this my brand?
On Valentine's Day, a former student opened fire in a Northern Illinois University classroom, killing five students, injuring sixteen and eventually taking his own life. I was on campus when it happened. This was my lightning strike, my Eddie Adams moment, albeit on a much smaller stage. My paper, the Daily Chronicle in DeKalb, Ill., was inundated with entreaties from media outlets wanting to feed off of our coverage. I kept on working for the next few days posting pictures and contemplating how my coverage of one tragic event would be more well known than the combined popularity of a thousand county fairs. It appeared that my brand was tending toward the tragic (I'd almost been crushed by a monster truck in August).
Photographers at newspapers this size are generalists--meant to cover anything and everything and do it quickly and well. But as a photographer and a writer in today's multimedia-crazed newspaper business, being good at everything sometimes means that you're good for nothing. As the furor died down from the NIU shootings, I confronted the fact that perhaps my brush with exposure had not furthered my journalism brand as much as I had imagined.
For all intents and purposes, a photographer's portfolio Web site is their brand. These sites run the gamut (In a relative sense as most photographers are not programmers as well) from accomplished shooters who worked their way to the world's hotspots largely without help from a major newspaper such as Chris Hondros to my former colleague Adam Gerik's proto-confessional photo blog. But if our brand is our Web site only, then it would seem to follow that the top 10 results for "war photographer" or "freelance photographer LA" could essentially corner the market. Metadata trumps hard work and killer documentary skills.
But that would be a fallacy. For all the change that the Internet has brought to photography, it has not changed certain universal truths. Scott Strazzante is a staff photographer at the Chicago Tribune. A past winner of the Newspaper Photographer of the Year in 2000, Strazzante has worked his way up the ladder by being a hard worker and a good marketer. Though he has been shooting since 1987, he does not yet have a portfolio Web site of his own. Despite this, his recently-published series on the encroachment of sprawl into rural Illinois took off via a convergence of buzz on listserves such as APAD and webzines such as PDN with the physical pages of the Trib and National Geographic.
"The one thing that the Web has done is devalued photographers. Now magazines go into Flickr and steal photos. Even though there are more outlets, it has really handicapped photographers because there's much more supply than demand," Strazzante said. "The top one percent will be fine. The kind of middle-tier photographers who haven't quite found their voice yet, they're the ones who are really going to suffer. It's almost become like society in general where it's going to be a greater divide between the rich and the poor. It's going to either be the super-talented or the people who are willing to give away their work for free."
Strazzante cites Vincent Laforet as an example of a photographer who has branded himself successfully. "He started out basically a sports photographer," Strazzante said. "Now, if anyone at a huge publication in America wants an aerial style, Vincent is it. He's made his name with creative aerial photography. He's now created a niche where he is the guy to go to for aerial photography. He's done that by being a great businessman in addition to being a great shooter."
In today's newspaper market, it sometimes feels as if the chances are better that you'll be laid off than receive a decent-sized raise. David Zentz is a 29-year-old photojournalist at the Peoria Journal Star with an impressive track record of high-profile internships and clip-contest wins under his belt. In a good to fair market, he would likely be at a major metropolitan daily at this stage of his career. But as it is, he has been bought out by the new owners of his newspaper, GateHouse Media, who have been slashing expenses through voluntary buyouts across its properties since purchasing nine Copley properties last year.
Don't cry for Zentz, he has a plan. Los Angeles beckons and a career in freelance commercial and editorial photography awaits. The only problem? How to create the DZ brand.
"No one should ever market themselves as a generalist because it devalues your voice," Zentz said. "I can shoot everything, but I want clients to know what my interests are so I promote myself and market as more of a specialist in documentary and hard news. I'm trying to figure out how to create multiple brands."
"You can look at photo magazines and you'll see Paolo Pellgrin, Alex Webb. You can see their stuff and recognize it right away or at least say it looks like something he would have shot. People do work over years to consolidate their style and concentrate their portfolio to a specific thing and that will bring them more work."
Style then, is brand. Chris Bartlett knows that first hand. Bartlett has been shooting still life in the fashion and beauty world for 20 years, primarily editorial and some commercial work.
"There was a much wider middle ground in which to swim and there was a greater array of photographers who were not particularly hugely distinguishable from each other who were all capable professional photographers," Bartlett said. "To take a nice picture took more skill than it does now. What has happened is that the bottom has risen up because it's easier to come up with a competent photograph. The middle area, where people branded themselves but not really distinctly, that marketplace is sort of eroding and people with a combination of very clear style and brand plus a good business sense are carving out a little niche for themselves."
The practical applications of this hits right where it hurts. Bartlett recently did an estimate for a job he is shooting next week based on previous work he had done for the client 10 years ago. They came back and said they wanted his price to be about 60 percent less than his bid. His competition? The in-house digital studio.
"The rub here is that the art director wants me to do it because he likes the way I treat the subject matter but the money people are saying this is what we're going to be," he said. "It's up to me to compromise my rate to get the job or stand my ground and say 'I won't do it for less than that.' It won't be done to the level it would be done with my original estimate because I have to cover more ground in less amount of time to make money. That is a pretty familiar scenario."
The irony is that there is a lot more potential for money because of the wider audience, but everyone is expecting that work to be done for free. In order to compete for the jobs that pay good money, strong work is key. When you mention a photographer's name, Annie Lebowitz or Robert Capa to use two examples, an image has to pop into your head. People need to know that if they're spending the money, they're getting a certain treatment.
So, then, is my one picture that made it around the world my brand? I tend to believe that it's not. For one, few if any photojournalists have been hired based on one picture. Iconic images can catapult careers, but being good in today's newspaper, and commercial, markets doesn't always mean that you'll get the job. Thus the paradox of being a more attractive job candidate when you're cheaper and younger than when you're better and more seasoned. Bottom line concerns aren't making brands less relevant, but they are making most photographers' stake less valuable.
Eric Sumberg is a visual journalist and writer (For one more day) in DeKalb, Ill. On Saturday, he will pack his life into his car and head to New York to transition into the next phase of his life.
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Tags: Brands
I won't be around for a few days as I enjoy the ocean and humidity.
Hi everyone,
I'm on a much needed vacation enjoying the beach and the sun in the Caribbean.
That means no posting from me for a while (though since brand tags launched I'm sure you've gotten used to it.
What I do have is some really smart people who have agreed to post entries for me over the next few days.
I've given them no brief or guidelines, so it's completely up to them. I hope you enjoy and I'll see you all when I get back.
Best regards,
Noah
PS - brand tags 840k tags ... I'm pretty excited.
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Another entry talking about brand tags. Sorry, but that's pretty much all I've got on my mind.
So it's been 12 days since I launched brand tags and it's been an amazing ride to say the least. As I write this I'm at 600,000 tags (whizzed right by 500k yesterday), a number so large I'm having trouble comprehending it. As I mentioned in my last entry it's been keeping me incredibly busy. I've been trying to answer all the emails sent through the site (now in the thousands), which has led to a few very late nights.
Anyway, I just wanted to continue highlighting a few lessons I've learned so far and also some of the more interesting commentary I've read about the site (at some point I plan on compiling all this into a proper entry/article). Also, an apology to all of you for ignoring this site for the last week and a half. I'll be back, I promise.
So, without any further ado, some thoughts in no specific order:
- I mentioned this last time and I wanted to highlight it again. Iteration has been the key to keeping the momentum going. I've answered hundreds of emails, made around 50 tweaks based on feedback and commented on 30 or 40 blog posts. I don't know what kind of difference this has made in the end, but I've got to assume it's helped. Keeping a site like this going takes a lot of work (I've been adding logos a few times a day). As marketers, I think sometimes we forget how much work it can be when it's out of sight (someone else is working on it). Anyway, it's not easy.
- It's been really interesting to see where traffic is coming from. Here are my top 5 referrers in order: Google (mostly traffic from Google Reader), AutoBlog (they just wrote about it yesterday and already passed every other referrer, just goes to show you where real traffic is), The Future Buzz (Adam's entry almost made it to the top of the Digg World & Business section), Seth Godin (he was one of the first big links) and WSJ.com. What I find interesting about that list is that it's fairly non-geeky all things considered (number 6, for the record, is Consumerist). Anyway, the audience certainly leans towards tech, but it hasn't been exclusively uber geeks.
- Yesterday I added an orderly view which was actually the recommendation of Kevin Kelly. Getting to email back and forth with him was one of the thrills of this project. (I'm a geek, I've admitted this before ... and just for reference, here's the Wired Magazine cloud.)
- Here's some of my favorite commentary about the results: Gems Sty, View from the Bottom, Matt Griswold [dot] com, Hubspot, Coilhouse and BlogLESS (whose design I also find quite striking. I haven't had much time to sort through and think about the results myself, so reading other people's commentary has been great.
- With that said, here are a few interesting things I've noticed: Some people confuse Audi's rings with the Olympics, people remember Hitler created Volkswagen, Hanes should try and hold on to Michael Jordan, EA Sports is Madden, people don't like their phone companies.
I think that's it for now. Like I said, I will return to regular blogging at some point soon. Thanks so much to everyone for all their support, comments, blog posts, twitters, links and general good will. It's been awesome.
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This has been a pretty big week for me and I've got a bit more good news. This time about likemind. Those of you who are signed up for the list have already seen this, but this month we've got a pretty awesome sponsor: Rob Walker who is promoting his new book "Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are". As part of the promotion Random House will be paying for coffee in North America as well as giving away a bunch of copies of the book (all the North America locations will have copies while supplies last). I'm super excited because this is exactly the kind of promotion I'd wanted to do for likemind. The way I see it, everyone wins: likeminders get free coffee and an awesome book and Rob and Random House get to promote the book to its perfect audience.
As always, all you have to do is turn up. likemind is this Friday morning, all the details are at likemind.us.
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Tags: likemind, me
A few quick notes on a whirlwind weekend for brand tags.
So far brand tags has been my most successful project to date (or at least fastest pick up). Since letting the world know about it on Friday I've gotten over 77,000 tags. It's also been on the del.icio.us homepage, metafilter and, most recently, Seth Godin gave it a shout out (including many others).
Anyway, I thought I'd share a few lessons, observations and other notes from the weekend:
Iteration
The first thing I realized was I needed to iterate on the fly. Immediately I realized a few things in the backend weren't working perfectly and fixed them on the fly. I also added a few features as ideas came in (specifically a game where you guess the brand based on the tags and a search engine to allow you to see all the brands tagged with a specific word. The other thing I did was keep track of where people where coming from so I could filter out tags at some point if I wanted to.
Feedback
This was another big one, in addition to adding things and making things work a little better was trying to listen to people's feedback and add both features and logos. A bunch of people asked for an easy way to see all the brands, which I added quite quickly. In addition I've gotten a ton of brands from people, which has both made my life easier and helped get the word out further (many people asked for the brands they work for/on and I'm sure they shared the results).
Unfortunate Words
It's becoming apparent that as more people come, more unfortunate tags are turning up. I had to decide whether to censor pretty early on and decided not to (expect for spam ... when one person adds the same word over and over again). This has all been one big experiment and I'm doing the best I can with it, but I can't do it all. I figure I can always filter things out later if I need to.
Twitter to Get the Word Out
Twitter has been a huge source of traffic for the site. I'm not sure what more to say about that, but it's been a great way to communicate with people on the fly and let them know as I hit milestones (number of tags, number of brands, etc.)
As the day goes on, I might add some more to this list and in the coming days I will try to go through some of the tags and give some of my thoughts (so far I think my favorite is how many people tagged Beijing 2008 with "tibet".
Also, any other feedback, suggestions or anything else are welcome. Thanks so much to everyone for making this such a success.
Update (5/12/08): As a side note, I've gotten a ton of email as a result of this. If you've sent me email for this or anything else over the last week or so and I haven't responded yet, I apologize.
Update (5/12/08): Wow, been a huge day for the site. Up to 110,000 tags. Links from kottke (a bit of a blogging hero of mine) and ReadWriteWeb. Anyway, thanks again to everyone for the links, emails, twitters, etc.
Update (5/13/08): Just got picked up by Wall Street Journal. Hot damn.
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A new project of mine on brand perceptions.
In lieu of actually writing something interesting (which I haven't done in a while), I've decided to release a 70% done project. It's called Brand Tags and the idea is simple: You tag brands with the first thing that comes to mind. The idea came to me as I was working on my Brand vs. Utility presentation a few months ago. The thinking went something like this: If brands exist as the sum of all thoughts in someone's head, then if you ask a bunch of people what a brand is and make a tag cloud, you should have a pretty accurate look at what the brand represents (see picture below).
I've been testing it for a bit, so it's pre-populated with about 30 logos and a bunch of tags. But go play and add more please. And if you have any logos in particular you'd like me to add, leave a comment or drop me an email.
Update (5/9/08): After a bit of success with this, I decided to start up Celeb Tags as well. Same idea. (And I need more celeb ideas if you've got any.)
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My favorite part of this Fortune interview with Google's Larry Page are his comments on new energy sources: "We've been looking a little at geothermal power. And you start thinking about it, and you say, Well, a couple of miles under this spot or almost any other place in the world, it's pretty darn hot. How hard should it be to dig a really deep hole? We've been drilling for a long time, mostly for oil - and oil's expensive. If you want to move heat around, you need bigger holes. The technology just hasn't been developed for extracting heat. I imagine there's pretty good odds that's possible."
"How hard should it be to dig a really deep hole?" Exactly.
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Tags: innovation
I usually end up deciding to write about something after noticing I've brought it up in conversation two or three times. As is the case with this article from Smithsonian Magazine on what makes New Yorkers who they are. Amongst other theories for why we are the way we are, it's suggested that "the special difficulties of life in New York—the small apartments, the struggle for a seat on the bus or a table at a restaurant—seem to breed a sense of common cause. When New Yorkers see a stranger, they don't think, "I don't know you." They think, "I know you. I know your problems—they're the same as mine—and furthermore we have the same handbag." So that's how they treat you."
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Tags: culture, nyc
Is this my brand?
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