A good story draws us in and keeps us there. This is as true for the written word as it is for branding and marketing campaigns. If you aren’t already embracing story in your campaigns, take a look around. You can start with this on-point article by Kimberly Whitler. She shares some great thoughts from James Warner on why storytelling should be a priority for marketers.
Stories help grab the attention of your target audience at an emotional level. It helps them connect with your brand, becoming more engaged. Which in turn makes it more likely they will want to learn about you, through the story you’ve built.
Because we live in a visual world, the right images are critical in telling your story. With the perfect key visuals and a cast of supporting imagery, you can build the entire thing. All without worrying about writer’s block. This might be when you think of hiring a photographer to shoot a bunch of images for you, but what if your situation calls for stock? We’ve thought about this and created some tools to make it easier. Let’s look at two different situations you might run into...
Maintaining look/feel and same group of people
You have a client launching a team brainstorming app, and you need to find visuals for the product website. Using 'brainstorm meeting' as a search term you’ve found an image that will work perfectly for the landing page. Awesome.
Now, what about all the other pages on your site? They need images too. Cohesive, consistent ones. So before you go scrambling with new searches for portraits or computers or meetings, let’s take a look at this entire shoot. Why? Because when we cover a subject we cover it broadly and deeply. Chances are very good that what you need was shot on the same day with the same people, same light and same location.
On the detail page of any image, you will see a link to view the entire shoot.
Clicking on that brings us to all the images shot on that day. On a typical day, we’ll manage to get 200+ selected images (out of the ~6000 frames we take) so there should be lots to choose from.
From this shoot in a matter of minutes, we can pull a lot of variety in angle, number of models, composition and mood. All with the same models, look and feel. The perfect supporting cast to fill out the rest of your story.
Building a Day in the Life
Now, what if you’d like to build a ‘day in the life’ type of story? It’s something we hear a lot. Especially if you are helping a client portray a customer segment in their marketing. In response to that, we’ve built ‘Same Model’ browse functionality into our site. As far as we know (and correct me if I’m wrong in the comments) no other site currently offers this functionality. HOW COOL IS THAT??
Let’s say you find this image of a healthy, happy boomer guy. Just look at him. Magnificent. He’s obviously active but wouldn’t it be great to have images of him at work or home, maybe among other people, as well?
On the detail page of any image that has a person, you will find a Same Model browse bar. Clicking the Same Model link will bring up all the images this guy has ever been in. *trumpets* HOW COOL IS THIS, AGAIN??
You will see all his images from the same shoot, but as you scroll through you’ll see other images pop up. I’ve found it’s quite helpful to check out the ‘shoots that contain these images’ at the bottom of the grid to see what other themes/shoots contain this model’s images.
So you can see at a glance that he’s been in a medical shoot (that’s a win), a couple of outdoor lifestyle shoots (nice for options), some business themes (win again) and even a courtroom shoot (ok now it’s getting crazy). Paging through we can quickly begin to build a story around this guy.
He’s definitely a caring doctor who dabbles in creative office work, and he likes to spend his free time in the mountains skiing with his son and goofing around. Also doesn’t mind being thoughtful near a mountain valley and is passionately in love with his (IRL) wife.
We understand that consistency in visual storytelling uplevels your message, drawing your audience along with you. We also understand that you’d rather spend your limited time working on your creative instead of finding stock images to build out those stories. And that’s why we’ve built this functionality into our new site. Just trying to make this part of your job easier. Take it for a spin. Let us know what you think!