This Post Stock World
The 2017 EyeEm Festival & Awards closed on a Sunday in September after a weekend of talks, workshops, and photowalks and we went home to our post stock world.
Sasha went home to Moscow as our new Photographer of the Year to continue her journey — 19 years old.
Why did she win? Her talent. Her commitment to keep growing and to work with us and this community.
The winner of The Portraitist category, Adeolu, accepted his award through a video. I saw the audience first connect with the work and then with Adeolu in real time, which was worth the trip alone.
Still thinking back to the festival, a trusted partner told us we were simply a proxy to 20 million creators. It’s not about us, It’s about them.
As I look at all our project work this year, I see so many common denominators & they are all Post-Stock denominators.
Do you still admit to using stock? What are those “necessary evil” moments where you either have to or can get away with it? Is stock dead to you or is stock now just a quiet part of your production workflow?
It used to be a problem solver but then our brains became conditioned to that aesthetic. I respect the best of it because I know what it takes to execute on the best of it. I just don’t love it. Micro came & further commodified and sanitized it. Social came and it stopped being in any way effective.
How are you handling this?
We are all social now and we talk in terms of “earned” “found” “branded”, we talk engagement, measurement and multi- platform. I am not stock and neither are the projects I work on. Neither is the talent we have with us who connect with brands and build their own audience instinctively.
Clients now know that the power lies again with “the rest of us”
We live in a post stock world where visual players need to launch and extend social programs, to target communities and audiences, to drive engagement. We now build trained “visual systems” and we understand brand aesthetics beyond “you seem to like blue”.
We live in a multi-platform world where generic doesn’t work and where brands need to tell their unique stories through custom, original content- all over the place, all day & all night. Not a lot of the current stock photo incumbents understand or can help you with that beyond “you want scale, we got scale!” or “Can I still help you with that digital use explosion?”
Show me creative, excite me with emerging talent and new ways to build audiences. Don’t make me talk packs and bundles. Don’t talk to me using SaaS enterprise speak. I’m not being locked in today. Show me you understand my world. Lets talk about the project in front of us. Lets talk creative execution.
Power is back in the hands of the creator and their communities. The world’s brands are seeking them out, giving them platforms to create. No need for the validation of an overworked art department or a royalty statement. Validation is closer to home.
Storytelling is back in a beautiful way. In a post stock world both brand & agency aren’t wanting big box image aggregators. Connect with them creatively, bait them into seeking you out & they will find you.
Disaggregation.
Our duty as visual agencies is to be that proxy and to surface these beautiful stories and new creators. Its to provide platforms for all kinds of content, earned, branded, whatever it may be. Giving platforms to Sasha and Adeolu is why we are here and how we find a way to connect to you.
To mean what we say and do. To back you up in what you do, to connect with your audience meaningfully.
Our projects now are real photography projects with real photography. The visual sought is that which is real & experienced. Moments imperfectly captured that are undeniably real moments.
It’s great that things got custom again, creatively messy again. Creatives are treated as adults again by visual agencies that are starting to look and talk like them again. Our role in visual storytelling and real creative is meaningful again.
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