Register for Magenta Friday

Magenta Friday is a workshop tailor-made for marketers ready to crush their goals and create industry-leading marketing experiences. Seven marketing visionaries will be taking the (virtual) stage on March 29 in North America | April 5 in UK and EMEA.

Save your seat!

Skip navigation
Movable Ink

Vince Vaughn’s Stock Photo Experiment: Proof Marketing Doesn’t Have to be a Bummer

Share This Post

The Great Vince Vaughn Stock Photo Marketing Experiment

Stock photos. You love them, you hate them. You love to hate them. Maybe you just hate them. Whatever your personal feelings, there’s no arguing that stock photos are everywhere. Businesses depend on an infinite wealth of visual content to create content marketing resources – from eBooks and presentations to blog posts.

So what do you do if you’re creating a marketing campaign to try and connect with your average stock photo user? Or just anyone who’s a connoisseur of goofy stock photos in general? Well, if you’re the team behind ‘Unfinished Business‘, a movie starring Vince Vaughn, you create your own.

By joining forces with iStock by Getty Images, the ‘Unfinished Business’ team created a series of stock photos with Vince Vaughn and the rest of the cast that are freely available for use and download, with a small snippet advertising the movie. This is content marketing at its finest – and proof that marketing doesn’t have to be a bummer.

Disrupting vs. Enhancing the Customer Experience

Video ads have become a favorite for advertisers, but it’s not exactly a favorite for viewers. Research shows that the “ad likeability” of digital video ads is higher than TV ads, but is still low, at 28% instead of 17%.

In other words, 72% of people don’t like digital video ads at all.

A lot of video ads still focus on getting your attention by disrupting your experience. You’ll be sitting there, trying to watch a TV show or that clip of a dog helping a baby learn to crawl, when an ad for a car appears – completely out of context –and breaks the experience.

With the Vince Vaughn stock photos, the ‘Unfinished Business’ team took a different tack. Rather than focusing on marketing that disrupted the customer experience, they created a way to enhance it.

Stock photos are great social currency. People are constantly sharing things they find entertaining and Vince Vaughn, Dave Franco, and company posing in suits in a white-washed background definitely qualifies.

“Vince Vaughn” is trending on Twitter by virtue of a few goofy pictures. Most video trailers never organically trend on Twitter, because people aren’t sharing them. And video ads? Forget it. People don’t share those ads, because they don’t like them and don’t want to subject their friends to them. It’s as simple as that.

Stock photos with Vince Vaughn as the star, however, can get people’s attention.

A Vaughnless Approach

You don’t have to create celebrity-powered stock photos to change your approach to marketing. Just ask whether the campaign is going to enhance the customer’s experience or disrupt it. Is it useful? Is it entertaining? Is it going to appear somewhere where people don’t want to see it?

Traditional digital marketing tactics are broken, but bright spots of truly entertaining, social-optimized campaigns like this one can prove that, sometimes, marketing isn’t a bummer. And some day, maybe, that will be the norm.

Want to learn more about how to create contextual marketing that can enhance the customer experience instead of disrupt it? Download our eBook, “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Contextual Marketing” or read about how Finish Line used contextual marketing to improve click-through rates by 300%.

Marketing News that Matters

Sign up for Movable Ink's newsletter to receive the latest news, research, and omnichannel personalization resources.

Sign Up Now