The Internet. We all knew, when it emerged, that our lives were going to change drastically.
Yet, only now are we beginning to realise the true extent of the transformation and, looking past all the gloomy predictions and finger-wagging, some of the opportunities of this new digital age. Aside from severely impacting the way we live, work and sleep, the technological development of the past decade has created entirely new avenues for a number of different professions. One area that has seen a particular shake up is photography. Liu Fang is an accomplished photographer based in Nanjing with over ten years of experience; his company Liu Fang Visions has witnessed first hand how the rise of the digital age has opened up a whole new playing field for his line of work.
In China, wedding photography is a substantial industry and until a few years ago was probably the major source of income for the visually gifted. Liu Fang himself comes from a background of helping local couples commit their happy moment to glossy paper. Yet, behind all the glitz and glamour, this business was not as rosy as it might seem. Yearly over 880 000 couples get married in all of Jiangsu province. A search on Dianping today reveals total of 469 wedding photography companies in the Nanjing area; considering that most clients looking for such services are only going to need them once, maybe twice in their lifetime, the whole industry is not a very lucrative or stable one. Enter the internet.
With channels such as Facebook and WeChat as well as free and simple website building tools, becoming a broadcaster of one’s own content for marketing purposes is simply a must. However, many companies do not have the in-house skills necessary to provide high-level appealing content, especially in the realm of photography. As a result, demand for marketing photography has exploded, changing the face of the photography industry in its wake. Liu Fang was perceptive enough to witness the opportunity offered up by new platforms that the online world is providing to businesses of any form, shape and size. In line with the changing times he has transformed his company from a Business to Customer (B2C) to Business to Business (B2B) setup, now solely working with companies to provide visual content for their various online channels.
The challenges and overall set-up differ quite drastically from his original line of work. “With wedding photography, you only have to make the people look good, that is all. When you work with businesses, whatever you produce needs to reflect their brand image, their VI. This also means that there is now more admin work involved, as you have pre-shoot meetings, pitches, etc., all in order to provide the client with the right content for their purpose.”
And where exactly are all these pictures going? Take your pick; whether it is company websites, Taobao, Tmall and other online stores or social media tools such as WeChat or even Facebook for the internationally minded wall-jumpers. Tabao in particular has created such a vast need for visual content, that Chinese media has coined the term Taobao Girls, i.e. models who make a major part of their living by doing promotional shoots for products to be sold on China’s largest online market place. Liu Fang is incredibly positive about this change, since it has provided him with a stable line of work; after all, companies are in constant need of up-to-date content, as opposed to newly weds; and per se the market potential is so much more vast when you could work with all the companies in the world.
This shift in how Liu Fang does business sees him join the army of a new age workforce; content producers.
Content producers is one of those wishy-washy professions to have emerged out of Web 2.0, a uniform definition is yet to be made as current descriptions seem to encompass anything from writing stories to website scripting. The general conclusion seems to be that CPs create content mainly for online channels such as a company website or social media, that can be of a written, visual or audio-visual nature.
But who are these people who chose to enter a field currently still in its infancy? Photographers such as Liu Fang are just a small part of the puzzle. While the Internet with its overload of free information has led to what many are calling the “death of traditional media” such as print and increasingly television, it has at the same time opened up an entirely new field of pursuit for aspirational journalists, communicators and PR pros. With every company becoming their own broadcaster, the need for people who can communicate in an effective manner using different types of media has skyrocketed.
In the past a journalist was a journalist was a journalist, and if they did not make it to the top, they were stuck writing the most unsubstantial part of the paper no one ever reads. Now however, there are so many different options for those looking to write professionally.
The trade-off is an abandonment of those most important of journalistic principles such as freedom of press and objectivity. After all, a content producer for a large computer game corporation can hardly write a critical piece on why gaming is bad; nor will one’s boss look too favourably upon an article about the merits of base-jumping on the company’s Facebook wall.
At the same time, does it not afford writers a much greater choice in terms of what to write about? In the past, a journalist might have ended up assigned to a certain section of a magazine or newspaper, which saw them covering stories they were not interested in in the least; the content producer of today, however, has the pick of the bunch.
You love gardening? While the chances of your grabbing that one post as writer of the gardening column in that national newspaper are minuscule, there is a host of large gardening companies out there that need you to write about anything from hyacinths to hoes on a daily basis for their various online channels from Taobao to Wechat. After all, a passionate and talented journalist can turn even the biggest pile of manure into an engaging story. As for moral integrity, maybe that’s overrated.
This article was first published in The Nanjinger Magazine, February 2015 Issue. If you would like to read the whole magazine, please follow this link
