Why selecting the right photo matters for your marketing
Shell once posted an update on LinkedIn about their work with Ferrari to reduce the team’s carbon footprint. The photo they chose to lead it: a Ferrari F1 car on the track under a sky full of grey smoke.
To anyone who follows F1, that combination reads one way instantly: a blown engine.
It’s the visual shorthand for failure in that sport one that Shell has sponsored for Ferrari’s F1 program for years, so the photo wasn’t a stranger’s mistake, it came from a team that should have known exactly how that image would land with the audience most likely to engage with it.
Look closer and it’s actually a clear sky with a wind turbine visible in the distance, meant to represent clean energy. By the time you’ve looked closely enough to see that, the first impression has already done its damage.
I didn’t click through to read more. The image didn’t earn it and I was laughing too much.
Why the photo matters as much as the message
Humans form a first impression fast, and a picture does that job before a single word gets read.
A 2019 research partnership between Performics and Northwestern University’s Medill School found that 36% of people had used visual search specifically to find things online, and 59% rated visual information as more important than text for making a decision. That’s not a niche behaviour. It’s the default way people evaluate whether to trust something.
Separate academic research, a study of 203 hotel websites by Miyoung Jeong at the University of South Carolina, found that the realism of the photos used was a strong predictor of how visitors felt about a website, which in turn predicted whether they’d actually book.
Hotels and oil companies are obviously different businesses, but the underlying behaviour, people forming judgement from an image before reading anything, applies just as much to a Sydney trades business as it does to a five-star hotel or a multinational energy company.
Why this matters even more now than it did in 2021
This point has only gotten sharper since. I’ve written separately about the current backlash against obviously AI-generated marketing images and video, and about why video that looks authentic and unpolished now outperforms produced, ad-style content.
Both are really the same underlying principle Shell’s F1 photo got wrong in a different way: the image you choose isn’t decoration, it’s a claim about your brand, and people are getting better, not worse, at spotting when that claim doesn’t hold up.
A stock photo that doesn’t match your actual business, an AI-generated image standing in for something real, or in Shell’s case, a genuinely real photo that accidentally says the opposite of what you meant, all fail for the same reason.
The photo is doing the talking before you get a chance to speak or email a client. Even worse if it is blurry, taken poorly or of something that has nothing to do with your business.
When getting it wrong is closer to home
For one client, I recommended hiring a photographer to take proper photos of their staff on site. They decided to take the photos themselves on a smartphone instead and the results were appalling.
The result was blurry, poorly lit and the body language read as closed off rather than approachable, not what you want representing the people a potential customer would be trusting with their job. It’s worth thinking about every place a photo like that ends up, not just a product page. In nearly every client account I’ve worked on, the About page is one of the most viewed pages on the entire site. People go there specifically to get a feel for who they’d actually be dealing with. A poor-quality photo there does real, quiet damage to trust, in the exact place a visitor went looking to build it.
This is also the exact problem my other business, La Lente, exists to solve for clients: professional photography that actually represents the real people and real work behind a business, rather than a rushed phone photo or a generic stock image standing in for something specific.
Why photo choice is worth treating as a real decision
Whether it’s social media, a website, an email newsletter, or any other marketing communication, the photo or video you choose is doing real persuasive work before anyone reads a word. Shell’s example shows what happens when a huge, experienced marketing team gets that wrong despite every resource available to get it right. It’s just as easy, and just as costly, for a small business to get wrong with a rushed smartphone photo instead of a considered one.
If you’re not sure whether your current photography is helping or quietly working against you, get in touch and I’ll take a look.
I run a photography business alongside my consulting work specifically because photo and video choice is this important, it’s not a finishing touch, it’s part of the strategy. If your current visuals might be working against you, see how I could help.
