Paul J. wrote: > i hadn't thought of it that way, as he being ours spokesman. > > I wonder if he is a decent photographer. i kinda doubt he is. > > I hope Americans dont see him as a Spokesman for Australia!
I wonder too about the connection to photography. Maybe I've just been immersed in "photography culture" for too long, but the Jack Hanna nature-guy type of thing doesn't make a connection to photography for me. (I'd much rather see just a good big portrait of a camera with some prints and a Spotmatic in the background, even.) My experience in the magazine biz is that non-specialist marketers don't always have the surest insights about marketing photography. I had an interesting experience with a newsstand consultant my company hired. He was NYC hotshot who charged a pile of money. He had all sorts of rules for designing covers that would sell--pretty girls, white background, lots of blurbs in the upper left hand corner, lots of color. So we hired a professional fashion photographer, followed all his rules to the T, and produced a cover entirely to his guidelines. He approved highly of our efforts. [Jul/Aug 1997 for those who might have back issues of _Photo Techniques_.] A little while earlier I had done a cover with a cyanotype of a cow skull and the single blurb, centrally placed, that said "The New Cyanotype" [Jan/Feb 1997]. The newsstand consultant wrote a 2-page diatribe to the publisher about how awful the cover was, how I was ignoring his advice and learning nothing from him, and that the cover was one of the worst he'd ever seen. Guess which one sold better on the newsstand for us? The cow skull cover, by a good margin. The fashion shot that followed all the "cover" rules was a weak seller for us. I don't know from marketing. But I had one little advantage--I knew my audience. I'd bet dollars to doughnuts I could come up with a marketing campaign that would spike Pentax's sales. But of course I'm not a marketer. <g> --Mike - This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
