Cartoons outperform stock photos 2:1 ? Portent

I curse whoever first wrote ?Have an image at the top of your blog post.?

Ever since then it?s been a barrage of crappy stock photos slapped at the top of every half-assed blog post across the internet.

Take this example. Am I supposed to believe there?s an company in the world that has this many perfectly-coifed, attractive people? This looks like some kind of Children of the Corn spinoff in the making:

Please don?t kill me Please don?t kill me Please don?t kill me

If I do a quick reverse image search on Google, I find that this same photo has been used 140+ times, without alteration:

How exactly is this creativity? In what frakked-up universe does this crapola actually add value to content?

Every time I see something like this, my stomach hurts.

Stock photos don?t kill me. People using un-modified, boring stock photos kill me.

I?m not anti-stock photo. I use them all the time. I love them. What I hate is folks reflexively slapping a random photo that?s vaguely business-related at the top of a blog post. It screams ?I don?t give a crap.?

Which is a very long introduction to a fantastic bit of research:

Mark Anderson at Andertoons ? a great artist and a super-sophisticated marketer in his own right ? tested a cartoon versus a stock photo. He had 260 people view a blog post. Half saw the post with one of his cartoons at the top. The other half saw the post with a stock photo.

The results are pretty telling:

But, if you read the whole article, the gap is even larger. In some versions of the test, he had 2:1 or 3:1 result.

Mark?s stuff is brilliant, but there?s a bigger lesson here: People prefer some creativity. If you?re going to add an image to your blog post, your options, best to worst, are:

• If your post is data-driven, why not really bend reality and present the data?!
• Original artwork, like a cartoon. It?s not expensive. Mark offers subscription services for $20/month, for example.
• A stock image, but altered. I love to use animals with speech balloons. It?s corny, but it makes me giggle in a non-too-insane manner, so I keep doing it.
• Anything but a non-altered stock image.
• A photo of your dog, Harryhausen, ripping apart a newspaper.
• A photo of that mole with a hair growing out of it that you have on your arm.
• A scan of your latest belly-button lint.
• The latest annoying internet meme.
• Really, still, not a stock image.
• ?
• A stock image.

This is not a sales pitch for Mark?s work, by the way. I get no kickbacks. But his stuff is awfully good. Check it out.

Source: http://www.portent.com/blog/internet-marketing/cartoons-outperform-stock-photos-21.htm

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