Comments on: More On Email Promos

By: JAB

JAB — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:30:00 +0000

…as an individual who partly feels responsible for this trend among model agencies I think it is clear to everyone hear that you have reached a time of oversaturation and marketing this way can only obscure your great work.

You are mostly all artists and have all of the inventiveness and dynamics of the web on your side, it is time to start inventing again.

The creativity you can bring to your marketing can sometimes obviously reflects the vigor and energy you will bring to your work as well.

As the image makers of the world…turn it up a notch and give a new kind of picture.

By: rph

rph — Mon, 05 May 2008 16:12:24 +0000

Yeah, sorry, must have got out of the wrong side of the bed this morning!

By: A Photo Editor

A Photo Editor — Mon, 05 May 2008 13:29:48 +0000

@rph: It’s not the talented photographers that are the problem. It’s trying to sift through all the mediocre work to find people with potential. There’s only 24 hours in a day

By: rph

rph — Mon, 05 May 2008 11:29:00 +0000

Oh, the cheek of it, a photographer calling a picture editor looking for work. Totally outrageous, after all why should an editor bother looking at a photographers work when you can get everything you need for pennies from a second rate stock agency. Perhaps it is time for you editors to get off your pedestal that you seem to have put yourselves upon and do some bloody work. I, for one, have stopped shooting editorial for magazines. I am sick to bloody death of this holier than thou attitude so many picture editors have when dealing with talented photographers, often so you can put your own second rate crap in your rag anyway. If you choose to use stock instead of building up relationships with talented photographers don’t be suprised when the good photographers no longer want to work with you. Stick to stock, I don’t care, after all it is cheaper than hiring someone and a hell of a lot easier for you. Perhaps you should be looking at what your actual magazine is- a means of selling advertising plus a couple of bits a poorly written editorial thrown in for good measure, not a prestigious art gallery, get a grasp on what it is you do and stop treating people like crap.

By: Lucas Cichon

Lucas Cichon — Sun, 04 May 2008 17:50:50 +0000

PEs should probably only look at portfolios that are dropped off or sent in. They could have a set time every week when they looked at them.

Get rid of the postcards, the e-mails, tri-folds, etc.. If everyone had to send out their book and wait for it to be returned they would be more selective about who they approached.

If PEs made a hard and fast rule that they would never hire anyone from a promo the mass e-mails, postcards, and all would go away. PEs would never do that because they are afraid of missing something. Now, it is way to easy. Drop a few hundred e-mails or postcards and sometimes you get a hit. No or little money, no research, nothing, just a big ass e-mail or mail list. Make the PE do the screening of what fits and what doesn’t.

Yep, I’m guilty of doing it sometimes. Wish there was another way but as long as a portfolio and a postcard or e-mail get the same priority by the PE it isn’t going to change.

By: twarnock

twarnock — Thu, 01 May 2008 16:38:29 +0000

it feels to me like most ab’s and pe’s are receptive to email and printed promos…it’s more the promo itself and who it’s from.

i think most of the “noise” - whether it’s printed noise or electronic noise - is photog’s they’d rather not hear from at all…unfortunately, they’re going to hear from all of us anyway…so the best we can do is target promotions and try to make sure we aren’t one of those that they don’t wanna be hearing from in the first place.

By: Brett

Brett — Thu, 01 May 2008 16:35:24 +0000

Maybe these photographer’s should read Seth Godin’s Purple Cow, I quote, “Just because you have someone’s email address or phone number doesn’t mean that they want to hear from you!”

It’s called permission marketing and it’s hard to do right without offending the person you’re contacting…

By: Andrew Pinkham

Andrew Pinkham — Thu, 01 May 2008 15:31:28 +0000

It would love to have PE’s & AB’s weigh in on HOW they want to be reached.

Everyone is different and if I had a better idea of art buyers likes and dislikes, this would clear up a lot of things. Some like postcards over email, and I think that everyone hates the phone.

I want to be good at keeping in touch and not a pest. It would be great to hear about of how PE’s & AB’s want to be approached by photographers.

They could do this anonymously, but I think it’s more useful to know who the person is. It could greatly help in marketing efforts and hopefully result in less pestering on the other end.

Keep up the great work Rob!

-AP

By: Russell Kaye

Russell Kaye — Thu, 01 May 2008 03:40:54 +0000

Rob- it may cause a ton of trouble but I like the idea of organizing a repository of A Photo Editor’s Email Inbox. If no one was singled out, if it contained say every promotional email (maybe not including viagra and luxury watches,) it would be a valuable social study. A snapshot of communications in 2008 - or forever long you could keep it going.

Imagine, if you will, that it also helped ease the congestion in Deborah’s email. You’d have them all signing up to forward you their email. Or maybe not. Maybe it would only raise the caliber of the promo email knowing that so many competitors would be watching. Or maybe not.

Actually now that I think about it, it would be the kind of project that would end up in the Whitney Biennial - but you’d have to include the viagra and luxury watches to give it the conceptual bulk of a museum piece.

By: Mike Shipman

Mike Shipman — Thu, 01 May 2008 03:01:37 +0000

Do photographers have to resort to blast email promos? Personally, I would prefer to do the research and specifically target the clients I want to work with rather than make that first impression as described. I imagine the question that would go something like “do they even know what we do?” when an email blast is opened to show food rather than sports, fashion rather than food, rafting rather than news.

It’s convenient and probably efficient to subscribe to/buy a mailing list, but if a photographer is going to spend time and energy (and probably money) crafting a promo (print or email), shouldn’t that same effort also go into where those promos are being sent?

Are photographers getting lazy or is it the newbies not knowing what they’re doing and the list providers taking advantage so they can make more dough, at the expense of everyone?

It really sounds like SPAM to me.