Daily Archives: January 10, 2017

Still Using Product Photography to Drive Sales? Part II


Today’s guest post is from Brian Seipel, a marking project expert at Source One Management Services focused on helping corporations achieve both Marketing and Procurement objectives in their strategic sourcing projects.

While this guest post is a bit off of the beaten path for SI, it’s a very interesting one and relevant for those Procurement professionals that want to run with the marketing bulls.


Five Ways Rendering will Beat Out Photography

In Part I, we noted that rendering needed to be “as good” as a photograph for organizations to ditch photography, and for this to happen, rendering needs to offer more. What is the “more” that is needed?

Here are several examples of what “more” means in this sense:

  • Perfect conditions – every time. Let’s face it: there are plenty of elements of a photo shoot that can (and will) go wrong. This is especially true of outdoor shoots or tricky products. Think of Breyer’s next “ice-cream-cone-on-a-hot-summer beach” ad. With rendering, you control all aspects of the environment, leaving nothing to chance – bad weather can’t shut down your rendering, and there’s no hot sun to melt your product.
  • Don’t like it? Change it. Another reality of product photography is its element of permanence. Once a shoot wraps, it is over. Small-scale changes may be possible in post-production, but also may incur additional charges. Larger changes will require a costly reshoot. Rendering provides the flexibility to make changes right up until the point you have your perfect image.
  • Rendering goes where photography can’t. Imagine filming a fly-through of the many intricate elements of a watch, with the viewer flying over the watch face and delving deep into the watch’s moving inner gears. Imagine this watch transitioning from a solid object to an exploded view, showing how a thousand individual components come together to form the whole – all while still ticking away and moving in time. These are powerful ways to showcase a product, but creating them with traditional photography or videography would be a struggle at best. With digital rendering, achieving these views is no more difficult than capturing a standard image.
  • Entrée into augmented reality. Just how far augmented reality will go in helping an organization reach customers is still an unknown. However, definite marketing plan synergies exist by developing a rendering that could not only replace a photograph but also feature in an augmented reality app.
  • Rendering keeps getting more cost-effective. To be clear, rendering may still be expensive depending on what work you need done. However, the fast pace of advances in this area have dramatically cut costs to the point where many organizations see a direct financial benefit to making the move. Photography costs are much less flexible – the costs related to studio space, product and equipment storage, and prop warehousing will always be present. Even though photography equipment keeps getting better, staying on the cutting edge of hardware still requires a large outlay of cash for studios, which is passed onto customers in every shoot.

Is Rendering Viable Now?

Given the speed at which technology is moving and just how lifelike the results are becoming, a transition to rendering from photography will, for many organizations, be a matter of “when” and not “if.”

So, at what point is this switch viable? For many organizations, this is a judgment call. For many, rendering can achieve results faster than photography and at a better price point. For others, rendering supplements photography to achieve results that traditional production can’t.

Thanks, Brian.