If you’re a fan of Women Laughing Alone with Salad, Completely Unusable Stock Photos and other pisstakes of generic stock imagery, then you’ll probably like this campaign from the Cannes Lions aimed at drawing attention to the upcoming festival, which hopes to get attendees to ‘fall in love again with what they do for a living’. And to do this, McCann London and photographer Max Oppenheim embraced stock photo cliches and shot various creative stars from around the world doing their best impression of over-excited, fist-pumping office workers.
Each shot features a tagline/watermark that says ‘You’ll come back as pumped as a stock photo model’ and various search keywords down below.
As Oppenheim said in a release: “It was a challenge to find just the right visual language to pull off this series. I was very careful to select neutral locations, styling and wardrobe to capture the generic world of stock. And it helped massively that all the ‘models’ understood how great the idea was and threw themselves into their performances.”
The festival runs from June 15-21.
