So you want to buy stock photography? Are you sure?

OK. I’ve got a little story to tell about buying stock photography. Once upon a time…

…there was a company called Widgetco. Widgetco made the finest widgets in the land. Their widgets were made of the best materials, the finest craftsmanship, and their customer service was awesome. A couple of years ago they hired an advertising agency (let’s call them Adco) to prepare some marketing materials. Adco hired a good photographer (who we’ll call Ken) who shot photos of the Widgetco’s awesome manufacturing facility and everything looked good. Adco produced some great brochures and Widgetco was very happy.

A few months ago, Widgetco decided to update their website and thought about calling Adco to rewrite their website. However, in case you didn’t hear, the economy is kinda sucking right now. So one of Widgetco’s managers suggested that they use a lower priced guy to revamp the website instead. It would save them some money and everyone likes to save money.

So they hired the guy (we’ll call him Skip) to rewrite the website. A few weeks later, Skip had the website finished. Widgetco was impressed that it was finished so quickly. Upon reviewing it they found that, in some areas where the website discusses information about the company and it’s history, there were a number of stock images used. They showed office scenes, cubicals, a conference room, and things like that. There was also a very poor image of the front of their building, but the sun was behind it so the front of the build is dark and the sky is blown out.

So they called a meeting with Skip. Skip told them that he used stock images to keep the price down. Otherwise he would have had to hire a photographer to shoot the office photos. The front of the building was his photo. Widgetco was disappointed, but Skip convinced them that everyone uses stock photography now and that it was OK to show interiors that were not really part of the company and he removed the bad photo of the front of the building from the website.

So, after a while, a couple of Widgetco’s customers called them. The customers said they were confused because they went to Widgetco’s competitor’s website and saw the same interior photos. The competitor made crappy, cheap widgets and the customer wondered if they were the same company.

It turns out that Skip and the competitor’s web designer unknowingly used the same stock photo agency and had stumbled onto the same photos. As you can imagine Widgetco was VERY embarrassed by all this and hired a photographer (Ken) to shoot interior photos of their offices for the website.

So, the conclusion to the story is that Widgetco could have avoided confusion, embarrassment, and damage to their reputation if they would have used Adco to begin with because Adco would have hired Ken to shoot the photos in the first place.

But in the end, they all lived happily ever after. 🙂

Thanks for reading!

-Ken