In homage to the great  Skip, I'm gonna mash on his style and tell the whole story up front.
An ad guy from a largish agency in Las Vegas gave us a call a month ago. They had a problem. They were looking for stock photos to go into a presentation book that a local company in Vegas (which I now know as a Casino) was looking to produce. The problem was that they were looking of photos of Kansas City Kansas. They wanted to incorporate some of the regular Joe activities and home-town feel of KCK. They had photos of the new Legends mall area that popped up around the new Kansas Speedway racetrack, but they needed other areas of KCK.
If you don't know KC, here's the deal: No one goes there. For good reason. There is nothing there. If you live there and read this, I mean in a photographic sense :P. It's just not very artistically inspiring.
Now, knowing that we probably didn't have anything, we ( brizmama and I) decided to take a little excursion to no-mans land, after asking the guy for some time to peruse our files. He called on a Friday and we said we'd get back to him by Monday.
After calling around to friends who know the area better, we headed out that Sunday. We took some pictures at a local lake, some fishing and boating activities and general family stuff. We then ran over to the "downtown" area, such as it is and got some pictures of the Unified Government buildings from a few angles, and found a mural that had recently been put up in the area on the whole side of a building.
We sent the e-mail off with a 5 or 6 selected pictures. The guy responded a little ho-hum that he'd send them off to the art buyer for review. At this point, we really weren't expecting much. The photos, while okay, were nothing to write home about. I wouldn't enter them into a competition here, for example.
A few weeks go by, I mostly forget about them.
10:30am today, I get a call from the art buyer. He needs the pictures and quick. Everything's going into layout this weekend and the team had selected four of our pictures to be in the Presentation Book. I pull out the stock price calculators (thanks DPC!) and give him a figure for the usage he wants. He up's the ante by $75. I say "I like your kind of negotiations!" I FTP the files to their servers, and fax a copyright release and invoice to them.
Moral of the story: Don't just take what they want, make it what they want. If you get a call about someone needing a photo, don't be afraid to ask for time, you'll probably get it. Get information about what they need, and try to make it something that they'll use. If they're in the mode of actively calling around they're not finding what they need on the stock sites and they're possibly getting desperate.
Basically, what we did is treat a request for stock as a commission job. The ad agency is happy, and hopefully, we'll get more business from it when they start advertising in the area. Maybe not, but it sure can't hurt. |
