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The marketing team at The New York Times recently approached us with a stock request. They were looking for images of high-end, rare, and classic Nike sneaker models. The shoes they needed photos of ranged from the classic ‘85 Air Jordan 1 to the more obscure ‘05 Dunk SB Low Staple NYC Pigeon.
The images were featured in NYT’s newest brand campaign, More of Life Brought to Life. This interactive campaign wove a narrative using a timeline of images, words, and articles. It began with sneakers, then linked together sports history, climate change, deepfakes, human evolution, and even chewing gum, to finally circle back to sneakers. It encouraged readers to explore how The Times journalism “brings all of your interests to life” with a subscription to access their articles on each topic.
The brief specified that each image depicts the exact model outlined in the stock request. This is because authenticity and accuracy were very important to the project. Also, they asked that the shoe be silhouetted on a simple white background and shown in profile.
With our brief in hand, we built a list of 3,126 photographers (out of our internal list of over 23,000 commercial photographers from around the world). This list included photographers who we thought would be most likely to have this type of content. We then sent out an email and received 389 submissions from 35 photographers. After reviewing and organizing the images, we presented a curated selection of them to NYT’s photo editors for consideration.
With a wide range of excellent options to choose from, the marketing team landed on a selection of images from two Seattle-based photographers. Carina Skrobecki and Chris Karges both nailed the styling, lighting, and positioning the client was looking for.
Once The Times had locked in their selections they looped in Kurator, a content curation and rights clearance service. Kurator handled the high-res image files and licensing agreements for the campaign and we worked closely with them to facilitate the licensing between The Times and the photographers. The photos are currently in use on NYT’s campaign webpage – definitely worth checking out if you haven’t done so already.
To learn more about how our Stock Requests work, read our Guide or reach out to our Stock Request team.
Ready to submit a request? Here’s the request form!