Alfred Maskeroni‘s AdWeek article, Vince Vaughn and Co-Stars Post for Idiotic Stock Photos You Can Have for Free, provided an irresistible talking point for Episode 86 of the Beyond Social Media Show.
The stock photography in question was part of a marketing effort for the Vaughn movie Unfinished Business. In order to fully appreciate the cleverness of this campaign, you’ll need a little context; namely, the premise of the movie: A routine business trip goes horribly awry. Here’s the trailer:
Unfinished Business Trailer
Twentieth Century Fox teamed with Getty Images’ iStockPhoto by to Photoshop a set of stock photos to featuring stars Vince Vaughn, Tom Wilkinson, Dave Franco and others, to hilarious effect. The photos look like standard, boring, posed stock photography except that include the familiar faces of celebrities!
Genius.
Twentieth Century Fox wins with some easy additional promotion and earned media for the film but iStockPhoto wins as well because you need to register at the site to download the photos, so it’s a customer acquisition play on their part.
Those who are most likely to register to download the photos are also those who would be most likely to buy stock photography: Media, bloggers and content creators. The reason they’ll download these particular photos is so they can use them in their stories about this campaign, like I’ve done (though I was already an iStockPhoto customer).
Finally, here’s the “stock photography.”
Unfinished Business Stock Photographs
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