A lot of people like to ridicule stock photography and hold it in contempt like “
Truly Awful Stock Photography” or “
Unsalable Stock Photos” or “
20 Worst WTF Stock Photos,” but we’re not sure what the organizers of
The 61st Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity are trying to do.
Also known as Cannes Lions, the festival is a global event for those working in the creative communications, advertising and related fields and commonly attracts thousands of delegates from around the world. This year it will be held in Cannes, France from June 15th through 21st, 2014 and more than 12,000 delegates from 95 countries are expected to attend. To promote the festival award-winning photographer, Max Oppenheim, was commissioned to produce five shots that “
perfect the art of the classic stock shot.”
Oppenheim used major advertising agency executives as models and portrayed them in a super-positive, fist-pumping manner illustrating the search terms: '
Success' 'Winning' 'Inspired' 'Energized' and
'Pumped'. The images were shot in generic office spaces in New York and London and the models were dressed in bland office attire befitting the stock image style. See Oppenheim's
“perfected” solutions. The models include:
- Amir Kassaei, Global Chief Creative Officer of DDB and this year's Film Lions Jury President, punching the air euphorically at his desk.
- Ted Royer, Chief Creative Officer of Droga5, New York, and Sean Sim, ECD of Ogilvy China, bursting with joy as they push an excited Angel Anderson, VP/Experience Director of CP+P in LA, in a chair along an office corridor.
- Cindy Gallop, Founder & CEO of If We Ran The World/Make Love Not Porn, sitting with her feet on her desk throwing a ream of paper into the air with blissful abandon.
- James Hilton, Co-founder and CCO of AKQA, and Laura Gregory, CEO and Founder of Great Guns, jubilantly draw an upward 'success' arrow on a graph.
- Benjamin Palmer, Chairman of The Barbarian Group, and Chloe Gottlieb, ECD of R/GA, performing a super-impressive, mid-air, high-five maneuver.
Each execution features a stock image-style watermark with the legend: 'You'll come back as pumped as a stock photo model.'
Senta Slingerland, Director of Brand Strategy at Cannes Lions, said, "Our campaign celebrates the one thing that everyone who goes to Cannes experiences: the feeling of falling in love again with what you do for a living."?
Observations
They don’t tell us how much they paid Oppenheim to produce these shots, or whether they are willing to pay that kind of money for the stock shots they license.
If buyers are unhappy with stock shots maybe that’s an indication that they are ready to begin commissioning more of the images they use (and paying fees that would cover the cost of production.)
There are certainly indications that the number of stock images being used in major print ads is declining. Yet, overall the
number of images used is increasing. Is this because there has been an increasing percentage of Internet and other small uses and the agencies no longer have the budgets to pay for commissioned work?