If you were CEO of a British company of Kodak's importance you'd be Sir
George Fisher, or maybe even Lord Fisher, by now.
Funny thing is, to this minor magazine publisher, you're just plain
George, and from my chair, you're running this little company alongside a
hundred others. That's the way it looks, even if you are enormously
powerful and worthy of great respect.
How can this possibly be?
Well, I have been putting out a magazine for over six years now, and whether anyone likes it or not, it is there. It gets read. Some photographers in Britain think it's better than its two or three competitors, others don't rate it.
You would imagine that Kodak, a company of such vast importance, would have advertised in such a magazine with some regularity. You would imagine that Kodak would be more important, perhaps, as a source of revenue than the average small photo shop or one-man band supplier.
Well, you would be wrong. Kodak has had exactly three pages of space - one of these indirectly via Computer Unlimited - in six years of publications, 32 issues. Not one single advertisement for Kodak film or paper materials has ever appeared within PHOTOpro/Photon. In the same period, Fuji UK has advertised in every issue, sometimes with two or more ads; indeed, when the magazine was launched, they simply said 'give us a good price, promise not to increase it, and we will have every back cover you choose to make available to us'. They held to their word.
Kodak wonders why Fuji has a dominant position in Japan (pretty obvious, really - look at the British and Austin Rover cars...). But Kodak might also wonder, sometimes, why Fuji became the British professional's choice of E-6 slide film and has made such great inroads into the professional market over the last decade. They may well marvel, too, at the progress made by Neopan 400 and 1600 in the last six months.
I simply point out that my publication is not alone. You can hunt in vain for regular, diversified, planned advertising of Kodak film to the broad parish of professional photographers, semi-pros and serious amateurs in Britain. Yes, of course the amateur press carries ads; of course the national dailies and consumer magazines have them; of course television is surfeited with (rather insulting) Kodak throwaway camera commercials. And there are occasional pro mag ads in short bursts.
But, Mr Fisher, TV and the national press is not the source of photographic wisdom. They are not the routes through which reputations are made, myths descend, heroes are created and villians identified in the line-up of products. It's magazine's like Photon, Darkroom User, Creative Image, BAPLA Journal, AoP Image, Master Photographer, The Photographer, HotShoe and so on which are the engines of change. What we write about today the amateur titles write about three years later; what our readers see in print becomes the street wisdom passed down the chain, ending up in the mouths of camera club gurus, keen store assistants, college lecturers and aspiring photo-journal writers. Reaching one opinion-maker at the top of the pyramid of information is better than reaching 40,000 at the bottom.
As a publisher, I have to confess that Kodak's financial value to me has been slightly less than that of any of our small, regular eighth-page mono classified advertisers. I have nevertheless flown the flag just as high for Kodak products as any others, devoting many times the number of pages that Kodak has ever bought in advertising to editorial coverage of their many innovations.
I doubt that you will read this, because if you actually studied the world's specialist photo press, you might understand rather better our natural affection for Japanese companies which have things called 'advertising budgets' and appoint local-market nationality staff with the power to make personal, individual decisions.
Raising interest from Kodak, even in little old Britain, is like mixing an enormous Christmas pudding - very rich but extremely difficult to stir, and if you're VERY lucky you might find the silver thre'penny bit without breaking a tooth in the process.
Of course, the last thing I expect is for Kodak to come to me and say hey, you were right; here's our money! At the best, you might think it worth resuming a visible presence in the pro/enthusiast sector in Britain, and say 'Miss out that troublemaker at Photon!'. It's always safer to shoot the messenger. Even this would be good. You see, we don't want to lose choice, and we need Kodak just as much as we need every other manufacturer.
We also need to reverse a culture which has been growing in Britain for the last twenty years, that tends to decry anything serious or aspirational. Kodak's latest TV ads here have contributed to that culture by making fun of anyone who values the content of a photograph or takes imagecraft seriously. For those who have not seen these, you get a girl looking rather 'young Margaret Bourke-White a la 1990s' in appearance talking to the camera about 'her photography' in three or four cuts which sound as if the ad might have a serious message about concern, quality, lifestyle (etc). Then the script turns it upside down as her expression shifts to party-animal mode (yo...), a 'yoof' set of subjects appear and she shouts that this all means she needs a Kodak disposable camera (flash bang wallop, end). The message in the ad, unintended or deliberate, is that talking about anything is boring; thought is boring; opinions are boring; what you really need in life is cheap booze, techno music and a camera you can puke up over without worrying.
On second thoughts, maybe Mr Fisher wouldn't get to be Baron Fisher of Rochester after all. - David Kilpatrick, Publisher