Case Study: Visual Promotion
Introduction
One of the most important and enjoyable aspects of my role is introducing new offerings from the roster to our clients, or presenting their existing work in a fresh and attractive way.
It’s important to me that I tailor my approach with each task, to give the engagement the best chance of success. In certain instances your audience might respond well to being shown a number of projects at once, in other cases it’s a case of letting one artist alone take the spotlight, and sometimes just a direct and more personal connection as the agency ambassador, will consolidate that relationship to the business.
Aims
In doing this, I’m working to meaningfully engage with our clients in a timely and inspiring way, with the ultimate goal of them considering the agency or specific artists, for commissions in the near future.The challenge is doing so in a refreshing and creative way, in order that this contact lands with maximum impact, in a competitive marketplace with high visual saturation.
Action
We have a number of ways of sharing work with clients. Passive promotion includes regular updates of our website and social channels, but also newsletters which - depending on the content and regularity - are either sent a broad array of clients or more industry or regional specific subsets.While working collaboratively as part of a team to maintain this marketing, I’m also responsible for more direct promotion in which I personally am connecting with a client.
Let me provide an example of this.
We represent two photographers, who produce very different work: Owen Silverwood is a conceptual still life artist, whereas Benjamin Vnuk is a photographer with traditional fashion and an emphasis on luminance.
What these two professionals have in common are their clients: both are regularly commissioned for the beauty market.
Aligning an artist to and sharing their work with a particular industry is of course common practice. What’s unique here though, is the decision to present them together.
Historically, whenever we would choose to share work via direct promotion with a client, if we did mention more than one artist they would be aligned by practice - portraiture, still life, or landscape.
I felt it would be interesting to show the work of two contrasting artists side by side, which hadn’t been done before.
What follows is a small sample of the document I designed that I was able to share with a carefully curated list of clients, for whom this was especially relevant.
Results
Far from competing with one another, the resulting pairings actually strengthened their mutual offering - the balanced aesthetic serving to enhance the visual impact of two artists at once and by extension, the offering of the business that represents them.
The impact from this promotion was very positive. Immediate feedback from key clients was followed by prospective project interest from those contact in the ensuing quarter, ultimately resulting in a number of commissions, allowing these two artists to be among the most financially successful during this period.