Author Topic: "guerila stock", anyone heare about this? (Read 4355 times)

.shock · « **on:** October 20, 2009, 17:25 »

Hello,

probably all you hear about guerila marketing, remember "blair witch project" movie??? I'm interestedhow many of us know what is "guerila stock" or what it may be...hehehheh. Can anyone help?

Regards,
BA

JerryL5 · « **Reply #1 on:** October 20, 2009, 19:04 »

This is no time to monkey around..

LSD72 · « **Reply #2 on:** October 20, 2009, 19:27 »

Maybe its a way to make people go ape over your pictures.

Lee Torrens · « **Reply #3 on:** October 20, 2009, 22:47 »

Ooh, great question Benis. Guerrilla Marketing borrowed the word from the term Guerrilla Warfare, which was all about strategies for fighting a bigger and better equipped army. So Guerrilla Marketing was all about how to achieve lots of publicity on a small marketing budget, which the Blair Witch Project obviously did very successfully. Applying the same idea to our industry, you'd probably be selling lots of stock without the help if big agencies or big budget technology or marketing.

The person who I believe fits the description of Guerrilla Stock 'marketer' best - and I'm sure he'd wear the badge very proudly - is Dan Heller.

In addition to being the maverick of stock photo business thinking, he sells a lot of stock photos via his own website. For these photos at least, he doesn't use any agencies, and doesn't do any marketing beyond lots of very strategic Search Engine Optimization (SEO). He has installed a shopping cart software on his website to manage the sales, so he's not paying commission or monthly fees to a technology provider like PhotoShelter or ImageSpan, and keeps 100% of the sale price, less fees from the transaction provider (PayPal or Credit Card) and his fixed hosting and domain name costs. While he knows how to take great photos, not all of the photos he sells on his website are high quality.

At a PhotoPlus Expo presentation in 2008 he gave some examples of his sales, including a photo he licensed for US$4,000 which was taken with a disposable camera! After he made the sale, he had to go through his *physical* archives, find the photo, scan it, clean in up, and then deliver it to the buyer - who was not unsatisfied with the result. His point is that he's marketing his photos to "the consumer" and not the typical stock photo buyers: designers.

Based on his research (comparing search volumes on agencies versus at Flickr and Google Image Search) the consumer is a market for photos many MANY times bigger than what the macrostock and microstock markets currently serve.

In terms of the "guerrilla" terminology, his situation fits. He's using little resources to achieve a lot against others who have a lot of resources. I suspect there's a lot more of that going on in our industry than most of us realize. If not, it's certainly going that way with the technology becoming easier and cheaper.

Perhaps soon we'll start seeing people referring to themselves as traditional stock photographers, microstock photographers, or guerrilla stock photographers. And you'll get credit for coining the term, Benis!

ap · « **Reply #4 on:** October 21, 2009, 00:02 »

wow, that's a really inspiring story. he's like the photographer of the cooking world, opening his own restuarant after being the sous chef for a few grueling years.

do you know how he designed his website and was that the biggest startup cost?