- Video
If you're using stock photos, you're Hide The Pain Harold.
He started as a stock photo model and became a meme. Is he on your website?
▶Play the video: If you're using stock photos, you're Hide The Pain Harold.Hide The Pain Harold started as a stock photo model. He was in so many stock photos, on so many websites, that he became a meme. Look out for him on dentists’ websites. He’s huge there. Use his photo now and your website looks ridiculous.
You know the rest of the set. Fake handshakes. People pointing at laptops, far too excited about a spreadsheet. Impossibly happy groups in huge, clean, sterile meeting rooms. Everyone knows they’re fake, and everyone has seen them on every other website. They make your business look boring.
Delete them. Replace them with real photos of you and your team doing the job. I don’t care if they’re taken on a phone, the lighting’s rubbish or Dave from accounting looks awkward. Real beats polished, every day of the week. Customers want to see the people they’ll actually be working with.
Someone leaves? Take the photo again. Revolutionary concept, I know. More in should you use stock photos?
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Read the full transcript
Rule three, hide the pain Harold. You know that bloke, you know, hide the pain Harold. He started as a stock photo model and then he became an internet celebrity because he was featured in so many stock photos and also he looks like he's dying inside when he tries to smile. That is the risk you run every single time you use a stock photo on your website. You risk putting a stock photo of a guy who is a meme.
You know exactly the photos I mean, the fake handshakes, the people pointing at laptops looking way too excited to be looking at spreadsheets. Those diverse groups of impossibly happy people in gigantic clean sterile meeting rooms. Everyone knows they're fake. Everyone has seen them a thousand times and they make your business look like every single other business. Boring.
Just plain straight boring. Everybody knows they're fake and everybody knows that they're on every other website. This is how hide the pain Harold built his career. He was featured on so many websites. Look out for him on dentist websites by the way.
He's huge in there. And he became a meme and now when you use that photo of him, it looks ridiculous. You need to begin to delete all of the stock photos off your website. All of them right now as much as you can and replace them with real photos of you and your team actually doing your job. We did this on Brookledge's website recently when we relaunched it.
All of the photos on there, especially on the homepage, are photos of the actual people who work at the business. So, when you actually get in touch with them, you're talking to those people in the pictures on the website. it comes to these photos, I don't care if you've taken them on your phone. I don't care if the lighting's rubbish. I don't care if Dave from accounting looks a bit awkward on them because authentic photos beat polished corporate fake stock photos every single day of the week, even if they are objectively less quality.
It's true. Your potential customers want to see the real people that they're going to be working with when they look on your website. They want to see your actual office, your actual team, you actually doing what you say you do for a job in the words in photos. And don't give me the pathetic excuse of well, what if we have team members leave and then we have to update the photos. You know what you do in that instance?
You update the photos on your website. You take them again, replace them, and put them on again. And then if it happens again, you do the same process again. If you update your website more than once every five years, it isn't an issue. Revolutionary concept, I know.