James Bond Inspired Advertising Photography:

The November 9th 2012 release of Skyfall and 50th anniversary of the 007 enterprise inspired one of our clients to seek advertising photography for their e-commerce website that captured the energy, excitement and essence of Bond. Seemed like an an easy gig based on the specs, but it turned out to be a little harder to mimic Mr. Bond’s sex appeal and mystique than we first expected.

Aside from location and wardrobe, the real challenge was finding our own ‘007 like’  male product and fashion model that would appeal to a young, male demographic (ages 21-30) and the to the people who buy gifts for them. We needed our guy to be youthful, yet sophisticated without being pretentious and who could be taken seriously without seeming too mature or grown up for the client’s product line being represented. Several of the male models who were considered had one or the other, but very few hit the mark across all of the ‘James Bond Jr.’ dimensions we needed. There was just something missing that made the test shots feel unauthentic and hard to take seriously as they seemed to distract as opposed to attract the target customer.

With the Black Friday deadline looming and after a lot of collaboration with the client, countless test shots and a few debates by the water cooler, we agreed on our Baby Bond. Congratulations to ACEMALE Model George who was chosen for the project and to photographer Christian Berns for the great work done to shoot with Bond like class and style but for a younger and trendy target audience.

The finished product which included a series of banner style images as well as homepage hero type graphics was delivered in time for the cyber Monday campaign our client was running and so far the feedback has been very encouraging – ultimately the sales and conversion data will tell the final story, but the initial results are fantastic. We’ll keep you posted.

The popularity of both Casino Royal and now Skyfall, along with this client’s vision for a sophisticated yet casual and youthful look and feel for their website and marketing campaigns drives home an emerging trend that we think will have an impact on multi-media advertising in 2013 across a number of verticals. We fully expect to see more requests along these lines as the 20 something, urban crowd starts to step it up a bit in terms of fashion, skin care and lifestyle in general.

To see more shots from this advertising photo shoot check out George’s male model portfolio.  We hope you enjoy it and would appreciate any feedback or ideas that other photographers, models and 007 fans may have on the finished product.  Happy 50th Birthday Bond!  ~AMM / Ft. Lauderdale Fl  USA