There’s a new look in town, says a creative at one of London’s biggest ad agencies, and it goes by the name “masstige”.

It’s supposed to convey a sense of prestige for the mass market, evoking quality through visual concepts designed to persuade hard-pressed consumers to part with their cash. He cites Nescafe’s Nespresso campaign as a prominent example of the trend, as well as some of Sony’s recent ads. Featuring George Clooney, a dark palette and apparently hand-written text, the Nespresso campaign speaks of sophisticated luxury and bespoke, hand-crafted quality.

“Companies have been taking trends from high-end fashion brands and applying them to their design,” he says. “They’re trying to make things feel high end. It plays on the world of celebrity glitz and bling, but stands slightly above it.”

Photographers’ agent David Birkitt hasn’t heard the tag before, but says he’s familiar with the argument. “Over the last 14 months advertisers were playing it safe with a lot of straightforward product shots,” he says. “Now we’re starting to see proper lifestyle-based campaigns again. People are more careful about what they’re spending their money on now so advertisers are focusing on quality. The emphasis now is on value.”

Over at Balcony Jump, Tim Burton’s photographers work on campaigns for luxury brands such as Godiva, John Richmond and Swarovski, all of which have opted for darker imagery of late. Paton says he hasn’t noticed a particular change in colour palette, but he has picked up on the flight to quality. “The mood boards we get sent now are basically the first 10 pages of Vogue,” he says [referring to the top-end brands who advertise in the magazine]. “Advertisers are realising that if you go for quality, people notice it. And if it’s a £2000 dress they want to show it.”

It’s quite a turn around from the last couple of years, he says, when advertisers went for safe options such as product-based ads or simply re-ran the previous year’s campaigns. The product-heavy ads sometimes involved little commissioned photography, with CGI versions of the items simply superimposed on existing stock photography. Re-runs were less of a problem for photographers and often very welcome, as they involve negotiating extra fees for their continuation, territory by territory, so both they and their agents effectively get paid for nothing.

But they’re not the most satisfying from a creative point of view, and ultimately mean less work all round. More exasperating is quoting on jobs and doing the pre-production for them, only to have them fall through at the 11th hour. That’s been happening a lot says one London agent, who asked not to be identified.

“It’s very frustrating because it’s a complete waste of time and money,” she says. “Putting together quotes can be quite laborious. We’ve even had ad agencies asking us to quote on jobs they know we won’t get. They tell us outright we won’t get them, they just want to compare our quote with other photography agents’. It’s cheeky, but when we’ve got other campaigns with them it’s difficult for us to say no. They’re dangling a carrot in front of us.”

Worse is the experience of one leading London advertising photographer who has quoted for ads and worked on preproduction only to find himself “gazumped” by other photographers – who go on to reproduce the visuals he proposed. As with the advertising agents, this successful shooter didn’t feel he was in a position to complain, either to the ad agency or the client, for fear of being blacklisted.

Client is king
Less frustrating but harder to understand, says the anonymous agent, is winning the commission, completing the preparation, and doing the shoot, only to find that ad is subsequently pulled, or downgraded into something far inferior to what was originally planned. “It’s even happened on ads we’ve gone abroad to shoot,” the agent says. “It’s all very nice we have these trips but it’s insane, especially when many of the shoots could have been done in-studio. You end up with something watered down that no-one is proud of because no-one stood up for it. We can try to speak up for the photographer but there’s a limit to what we can do – what we need is a strong art director.”

Client is king, it seems, because ad commissions have been so scarce no-one wants to upset them. Birkitt doesn’t quite echo the anonymous agent’s word but does say clients have now got more control than ever before. Clients are working much more closely with the art directors and photographers, he says, and bringing the photographers into the process much earlier than ever before. “By the time everyone gets into the shoot they all know exactly what they’re doing,” he says. “I think it’s a good thing, it’s much more collaborative now.”

This shot by Jenny Hands for John Richmond’s Autumn/Winter campaign in 2009 uses a very restricted palette and well-placed whisky and champagne glasses to hint at gilded luxury.

Image © Jenny Hands, who is represented by Balcony Jump.

In fact, some clients are now so involved in the process that they’re ditching ad agencies altogether, employing freelance art directors and doing the ads in-house instead. That’s how it works at Boden, says Paton, and it works perfectly well. “Clients are so much more savvy about the whole process now,” he says. “They know how to create great photography.”

Paton points out that some companies have also fared better than others too. Technology companies, especially those selling mobile phones, have continued to expand and they’ve continued to advertise too – with their products evolving all the time, they need to keep on selling. Fashion has also remained a steady advertiser, given the fast turn over of trends, but the true victors in that sector have been the online fashion retailers.

He now works with Net-a-Porter and Asos on campaigns – two online stores that simply didn’t advertise two years ago. Their popularity could be down to the recession, with shoppers saving transport costs by shopping from home, but their high-end prices suggest it’s a structural not cyclical change. And Asos worked directly, rather than via an ad agency.

Perhaps, as Eliza Williams suggests in her report on page 86, the true losers in this recession have been the traditional ad agencies, not the photographers.