Crispin Porter + Bogusky recently crowd-sourced a logo for their client, Brammo Motorcycles. It's a pet project of theirs and they appear to be looking to get good ideas for cheap. Apparently people are willing to give them away for cheap. The commodification of creativity really appears to be happening. Advertising is a tough biz to break into and those on the outside will do just about anything to get a foot in the door.
The way things are going, a lot more of us are going to be on the outside. In fact if agencies keep commodifying creative endeavors, agencies will simply become curators and facilitators. Creative will be a value-added service and it won't be vertically integrated.
Take a look at photography to see this in action. Photography has long been the realm of dilettantes and amateurs. But only a tiny fraction earn livings from the craft. Then along came iStockphoto.com and upset everything. Amateurs with chops could find their work being used by art directors and designers around the world, yet only get paid pennies for what a photographer used to get paid thousands of dollars for. But for the amateur it was satisfaction enough to see their work used. They were taking the photo anyway, so why not?
It's been painful for the pros. It's been extremely painful for the big stock houses like Getty and Corbis. It transformed the photography industry and there's nothing anyone can do about it.
Now istockphoto.com is about to do it all over again, except to the field of graphic design. I got an email today asking for my logo submissions. They're going to start selling logos. This isn't a new idea, but we've seen what istock can do. They have the capacity to transform industries there's no reason why their machine can't swallow up graphic design and illustration as well as photography.
I'll admit, I'm lazy-- and clients are always looking for a deal. So I use a lot of stock photos and illustrations. If I need an icon for a website, I could spend half an hour making it in Illustrator, or I could spend five minutes and five bucks and get something close to what I want from istock. I do it all the time and I've been doing it for years.
For some reason I think logos are different. I'm sure all the photographers looking for work right now would back me up here. A logo exists for one organization. I shudder to think that you can find the logo that perfectly encapsulates the essence of your brand by flipping through a catalog. But I know I'm wrong. One look at all the crappy logos out there and I realize that no-one cares nearly as much about logos as designers do, and that includes clients.
Saul Bass is probably turning over in his grave.
Photographers and other stock houses did it to themselves. I've dealt with numerous photographers who wanted to charge me thousands to do the shoot, and then charge me even more to use the photos from that shoot. I mean, c'mon. But, I might add that iStock is moving away from their original model and are charging considerably more for their "elite" photographs.
ReplyDeleteGood point. I'll never belittle a good photographer--they can make or break a project. But istock has proven that not every project needs ultra high-quality custom photography. Clients know this. Quality is what always suffers when you cut cost and we're all finding out that 'good enough' is the new standard for a lot of projects.
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