Baby steps

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I didn't sleep well last night, and after just a few hours of sleep my body woke me up at my normal 8-ish feeling pretty crappy... its the sort of feeling that I have come to expect when spending dozens of hours designing web sites (which only exhausts ones eyeballs and mind, and not at all their body, so sleep doesn't come easily). So after a short round of NYT, Miami Herald, and blog online reading, and an e-mail or two, I was back under the covers for take 2. When I was jarred back to alertness at lunchtime I could barely make out the twin rings of both my office line and cell phone. Nearly falling over on the way out of our bedroom, I missed both calls.

The voice mails alerted me that both were related to a last minute bid that I was asked to make on a pretty standard PR job. The terms were clear, and the usage was very demanding, and after 5 mins of running some numbers with Maria at Redux, we had our estimate in a couple hours before the deadline. It was a pretty basic equation: CEO of big company, via big advertising/pr firm, wants BIG BIG usage rights on a simple set of portraits. So bigX + bigY + hugeZ should = hefty photographer's fee. (I learned a long while back a standard measure that a buyout should equal something in the neighborhood of 5x creative fee of standard usage).

A few minutes ago I got a return call from Redux which began with, "are you sitting down?" Hmmm... I'm thinking, that could be either really good, or really bad?! Maria went on to explain that our estimate was at least $17,000 higher than their lowest bid. !@#()#@ $!!*@#$*@ #$*@#$ *@#$*@#$ FUCK! What kind of friggin' moron out there is willing to work at such a giant discount that effectively helps to deteriorate the market he's trying to earn a living from. I'd like to think that this person is a young, up-and-coming guy who doesn't know any better, but I don't think that's the case. This wasn't any ad firm calling, and I don't think they were bothering to call local photo labs looking for some schmuck who actually quotes work by the hour. How can people give away their copyright on an ad shoot for a major company for less than 5k unless there is basically a iron-clad warranty of continued work (which is a myth unto itself).

Salty language and indignation aside, Redux asked me if I would like them to re-bid at a much lower and "competitive" bid and I told them no thanks. I may be a couple of thousand dollars poorer for the decision, but I'm not toeing that line. My rep immediately let her breathe out when I said "no way" with a great big "oh good!" She knew it was a terrible deal (or a great one, depending on how you look at it), and I can only cross my fingers and hope that something fucks up and they have to budget a reshoot. Our initial bid felt a little high to me and purposefully included a few items that weren't incredibly important, but that's the game of negotiation. Obviously the laugh was on us this time.

This scenario is not new to me or anyone else. It happens everyday, in every market, and its pretty sick (especially when a buyout only costs marginally more than if it was actually an editorial shoot). But since the web work I've recently been doing is all connected to a big push that I'm getting ready to make (another fingers crossed for the few thousand dollars I'm expecting to spend to try and get the ball rolling) into advertising and corporate photography, its a pretty depressing first couple of steps. Hopefully as I learn more about the ad world I'll find some clearer weather on ahead.

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Comments (7)

Yeah, its really bad out there, especially for the "exec" portrait type work. Seems like the business are happy with just about any quality (as you can see by most of the crap out there). I just posted on APAnet about a recent "find" I made WRT who else was bidding on a project I bid on. To keep the story brief, I was mistakenly given access to a web link that the agency used to keep track of the names with a link to the photographers websites, description of their work, their bid and their use terms. Needless to say, I was SIGNIFICANTLY higher than the other three photographers and I was the only one who didn't give unlimited use. And this was a more than fair bid that took into account the production, expenses, crew, post production, etc, etc. Like you, even if they gave me the opportunity to do the job at their selected photographer's fee I would have said no. Very discouraging indeed.

Jeff
http://jeffsingerphotography.blogspot.com

Maybe it is time to launch the "worst exec portrait award". I have stopped being surprised by the amount of crap design, artwork and photography a company is willing to use. Building a brand used to be a serious process. Now you will even find execs being photographed by their seceretary with an el cheapo digicam (and I don't mean those dirty photos they snap in motel rooms at night). Who cares about blown highlights, shadows from the flash on the wall behind the subject, total unsharpness, wrong white balance and color casts...

I think photographers should look at how other businesses set their prices and their value. Perfect case is Apple Inc. Apple products are great but far from cheap. Here is a company that is going to sell you a luxury item (do you seriously NEED what the iPhone has to offer) at a cost of $500 and tell you that you MUST change your provider to in order to use it. What audacity :) And guess what - people are camping out their stores to do just that. Gotta love it. They made their value by not competing with the Dells and Toshiba and Sonys and lowering their prices - they competed by raising the bar on quality and raising their prices accordingly - bloody genius.

It's a shame so many photographers are not learning from that lesson. They're lowering the bar and the quality on their product. Clients will always want cheaper. But they will also pay for what they perceive to be better. That's why the average Fortune 500 CEO would drive a Mercedes and not a Nissan.

Ultimately I guess you just have to stick to your guns and do what you think is best - and provide estimates as to what you think you work is worth.

-Sherman

Thanks all...

What I think is interesting in this debate is that a lot of this problem is usually blamed on hobbyist photographers who are in it more for the experience or "art" and less for the money. But that's really only the case in a model such as Flickr and some publications beginning to use the free work there under creative commons licenses. With the ad world I think the problem is actually the pros who really just feel uncomfortable with the price tags that they might be delivering to clients. I remember the first time I wrote down a 5-figure number on an estimate... I was almost embarrassed as if the client would see right through me.

A company like Mercedes, though, is able to charge what they do because they've spent umpteen millions on branding their product to have the cache of premium quality. Maybe if more photographers spent a lot more on advertising, they would feel more confident with their higher (and reasonable) prices.

Any time I get an estimate back from my producer that is in the 5+ figures I still get the "oh they aren't going to go for this" thought in my head.

H. L. Mencken said, "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." Maybe we need to update that for photography and say "nobody ever got rich overestimating the taste of the american public."

Your post helped inspire my post:
http://jeffsingerphotography.com/blog/2007/08/08/when-quality-is-job-none/

Jeff

Unfortunately, it seems that unless the buyer wants "you" because of your unbelievable vision and un-reproducible creativity, the prices are going down, down, down...

I guess if I was a buyer and didn't need the utmost quality, I may be tempted to shop on price (at least partially, anyway). And as a photographer, unfortunately, it's always a game of "who am I bidding against," and "what kind of bids are they getting?" This year alone, I'd say that I was "way overpriced" on at least 50% of the jobs I bid on.

I honestly believe that the supply is way above demand. The buyers have the advantage when it comes to price. Routine photography, is not valued very highly. It seems the days of being paid well for environmental portraits and the like, are long gone.

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