Public awareness campaign

[Doug Nelson]

How would you design a campaign to increase public awareness of the existence and possibilities offered by digital photo restoration? What would it contain, where would it be? Who would it target?

[Jim Conway]

Originally Posted by Doug Nelson

How would you design a campaign to increase public awareness of the existence and possibilities offered by digital photo restoration? What would it contain, where would it be? Who would it target?

Write for your local small town newspapers (or have a local or online PR source take your thoughts and do it) - create at least ten articles before you contact the editor - keep them simple - one idea per - slant them towards Seniors who have the responsibility for preserving their collections for future generations.

I may have posted one such column on this forum awhile back - a simple thought about having a paragraph in your Last Will that keeps peace in the family by leaving the old photos to a named member of the family along with enough money to have reproductions made for any of the rest of the family that wants a copy of one or more of them. Another was on what to expect from homeowner policies and the Insurance Adjustor if your photo collection is damaged. I'm sure you can think of lots more - the objective of course is to become the local "expert" without having to tell everyone you are in some ad that carries little or no believability.

Jim Conway

[JustChecking]

how'bout a poster w/ a photo of some guy, and the photo would be ripped that it would look like the guy has head chopped off or something, and a big label "can you repair it? WE CAN" or something along these lines...

sorry if it's too aggresive or something (blush)

once you have their attention... use eg. jim's ideas

[painperdu]

There are so many potential targets for restoration that the hardest part is to choose one.

One area that has huge potential is wedding anniversaries.

How to reach them?

-Courthouse records
-Mass mailings during the popular wedding months -april, june, july.
-Bridal registries -co-op a deal with registries?
-Wedding receptions -supply the reception with disposable cameras with your advertising?

The idea is to reach those with old wedding photos in need of restoration while their memories are being primed via someone elses wedding.

What content in the pitch?

The obvious would be restored wedding photos but I would also inlcude other things that may help to bring back memories of times past. Include, for example, a photo of the old "lovers lane" from way-back-when or a couple playing in front of their new suburban home with baby in a swing.

I wouldn't make the promotional too verbose except for the essentials -web address, discount, business name . . . Maybe a headline like "Remember When? Remember Again!".

[Jim Conway]

I think this is a terrific post and the kind of forward thinking that people in the digital world should be pursuing - In my years in the studio business I saw the changes from the In Studio Professional Weddings gradually give way in the 50's to the Candid approach introduced by semi-pros. The reluctant Pros went by the way side while the progressive studios adopted a professional approach to candids with higher quality finishing and album offerings - the semi-pros became the "stringers" that the studios used for weekend assignments - some of them earning $60,000 a year or more just working weekends in addition to their regular jobs.

Now the wedding business is in another transition and if I were still in the studio business, I'd be looking for people in this field to work for me. Here's why - we did well over a hundred weddings a month and whenever we had a technical failure or a problem with the lab or for whatever reason the photos were not as good as they should be, we contacted the relatives of the Bride to see what they had that we could use as a filler for the final album presentations. A few decades ago we usually had to do a lot of work with those photos to bring them up to a pro look - that's not true today.

My granddaughter just got married this past month - the photo assignments went out to a number of Aunts and Uncles who own good 3 meg or better digital cameras along with several digicams set up for taking the movies. The kids histories were organized into a slide show by their fathers and used during the wedding in a presentation on the churches multimedia screens. The photos are numerous and great compared to the days when instant checking was not a possibility until long after the event - and in my mind - I was watching it as a great opportunity for forward thinking Studios and Bridal Consultants to hire people like those in this forum as "Photo Coordinators".

No one needs the old pro- lighting setups with zero lux cameras - even the Grandmothers can get great shots now that they don't have to use a flash designed for 6 ft on at 30 feet on a box camera and have 10X zooms for impact. I'll bet many studio owners are tearing their hair out by all of this when they could be enjoying the good life hiring people like you to do the work in coordinating the photos from the events with the bridal party, cleaning them up to match in look and quality and bringing them together as a presentation that can be enjoyed on DVD in their own home theater systems, put into online albums or offered in traditional high quality photo quality print albums by the studio

It's an exciting time to be in photography, but them there is nothing new about that, it always has been! Love your idea and to anyone who has read this far - thanks for bearing with me for the history lecture!!

Jim Conway
Timemark Photo Conservators