Anyone who has put together a campaign or other piece of creative material knows how essential it is to pick out the right models to reflect the message. And if you’re working on a series of slides or panels that will showcase a variety of people, you must make sure to include some diversity. Beyond the principle message, these photo or video selections will help you reach and connect with a wider audience.

As people search Shutterstock, they tend to add in keyword descriptors such as “Middle Eastern” or “Asian” to help narrow down the look of the man or woman they seek. There has been a rapid rise in these kinds of multicultural searches over recent years; leading to an increasing demand for photographers to accurately portray people on different backgrounds and ethnicities in their portfolios. The reasoning behind this: if customers are showing a growing interest in something, photographers should deliver the goods.

But it’s not just categories of people where these shifts are taking place. Demand is also growing for pictures of mothers, granddaughters, couples, and more. The stats prove that trends today emphasise everyday people in everyday situations.

Believe it or not, for a long time, women were vastly underrepresented. That’s changing too. In many regions of the world, downloads of images that prominently feature women have risen substantially in just the past year. Still, there’s room for improvement: Images of men are selected nearly twice as much as those of women.

Customers in nearly 100 countries downloaded at least one image of a transgender person in the first half of 2015. What this telegraphs is the move toward inclusion is not only taking place behind the scenes, it’s begun to find its way into how we illustrate our world.

What’s clear from the data is that there’s a seismic creative shift going on. To compete in the fields of marketing, advertising, and design these days, you must step up and consider what areas -- and people -- you might be leaving behind.

 

By Danny Groner, Manager of Blogger Partnerships and Outreach at Shutterstock.

PrivSec Conferences will bring together leading speakers and experts from privacy and security to deliver compelling content via solo presentations, panel discussions, debates, roundtables and workshops.
For more information on upcoming events, visit the website.

comments powered by Disqus