Self Promotion Examples with Analysis (2)

Luke Jackson ('Luke_JClark')

Photographer, aged 20, British

Focusing mainly on landscape photography, Luke Jackson chooses to promote himself almost entirely through the social network 'Instagram'. Here we can see he has an established following of over 50,000 people, along with links to his promotional projects with companies such as 'Specsavers' 'Starbucks' and 'Samsung'

Although a successful as a stand alone page, Jackson has been featured on some photography showcase profiles. This is an effective way of displaying work to a larger audience. He has likely done this through one of three ways: Including the showcase profile's hashtags, messaging them directly or being discovered by them.

As we can see below in the comparison of likes between Luke's post and the 'Lense Bible' post

 Original Post

















Repost from 'Lensbible'
















As we can see, the latter has many more likes and comments, along with a link to Luke's profile, to encourage people to follow his page.

Pages like this are a great way to have your work discovered by fellow enthusiasts and potential employers. They often have many more followers than a photographers own profile as they showcase a broad variety of styles.

Here we can see that this particular page has 800,000 + followers, over 15x the amount that Luke's standalone profile has.

This approach of presenting oneself online is very effective as it doesn't come off in a pushy way and it is already established that the followers have an interest in photography, so it is much easier to appeal to them. 

I feel as though I could incorporate this style of promotion in my own work, as 'Instagram' is a platform for video, audio and still images. It is important however, to think about the demographic that Instagram appeals to. As we can see from the graph, Instagram has the highest proportion of younger generations compared to the total number of users. It is certainly worth considering other avenues of promotion as to not limit myself on reaching as wide an audience as possible. Possibly including Facebook and LinkedIn in my online presence would be useful to engaging with all demographics.

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Self Promotion examples and analysis (1)

When working in a creative field it is important to be able to promote ones self successfully. Here I have picked out a few examples of self promotion in the creative field and I will analyse the success of these people, and whether there is anything of theirs I would incorporate when promoting myself.

Example 1

Platon

Photographer, aged 50, British

Known primarily for his portrait work, Platon is a British photographer who's worked with some of the most influential people across many subject areas, including Vladimir Putin, Prince, Serena Williams and George Clooney.

Platon presents himself almost entirely through printed work, with publications in famous magazines like 'Time' and also through gallery work. This is appropriate for his sophisticated style as his work often crosses into the definition of art. His subject matter and style therefore are mirrored in the way he presents himself, he has no social media presence (possibly because this is associated with a younger generation)

I think that Platon's established reputation often means that he does not have to promote himself very much, rather other professionals recommend him based on his past success. This has clearly been an effective way of marketing himself.

Platon does have a simple website with many galleries of his work, along with a small bio although this serves mainly as a record of his past work, and does not have a promotional feel to it.

Platon's style of promotion would not work for me, as the rise of social media and marketing has left many paper publications in the dust to some extent. My own portfolio of work, includes a range of video, audio, animation and graphic/ photography work. Only a few of which of these could even be showcased in a magazine. I would also argue that the market of people trying to draw attention to their work has become more competitive, perhaps Platon's more relaxed approach of marketing himself would not be as successful nowadays.

I stumbled across Platon's work in his collaboration with the Netflix original series 'Abstract:' which was released in 2017. I realised a few minutes in that I recognised a lot of his work, athough I had never heard his name prior to this. I feel like this documentary was a way of showing people who this photographer actually was, and having people realise that they already knew a lot of his work.