Stock is Dead — Long Live Stock

3 Adobe Stock innovations from Adobe MAX 2018.

Image source: Adobe Stock / Jesse Morrow / Stocksy.

Stock content deserves its bad reputation. For far too many years, businesses have gotten away with recycling the same stale offices and fake smiles into their assets and ads. This happens because stock photography saves time and money. But efficiency is no excuse for the type of brash creative laziness that’s turned “stock” into a dirty word.

After all, many of history’s iconic creators crafted their works with “stock” material. Art historians don’t dock Pablo Picasso for appropriating Braque’s 1912 experimentations with collage. And no one walks through a gallery of Picasso’s historic collages from 1912-1915 rolling their eyes at the “stock” material used in their creation.

Picasso’s infamous insight on creativity is a testament to the fact that stock material is not doomed to create drab creative works: “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.”

Fast-forward a century, and Coldplay’s 2016 music video for “Up&Up” brilliantly employed reels of stock footage en route to 164 million YouTube views and a Grammy nomination.

If you attended Adobe MAX this year, you heard the call to arms: It’s time to empty the trash bin on dated biases toward stock content. This was proclaimed in new partnerships, innovative product updates, and inspiring conference sessions. If you weren’t able to make it, here are three ways you can turn Adobe Stock into your own creative weapon:

1. Search Stock smarter

Our latest release of Adobe Stock applies the power of the Adobe Sensei artificial intelligence platform to the process of content discovery. You can now upload an image to Adobe Stock, and Sensei will analyze it to recommend similar images based on its content, color, or composition.

The easier it is to track down on brand-on brief content, the easier it is to build assets and ads that feel anything but stock at a fraction of from-scratch cost.

Try this: Whip up that brand inspo deck or latest campaign mood board and upload images archetypal to your identity. You can add keywords or filters to refine your search result, and you even have the option to focus on the content, color, or composition of your sample image.

2. Globalize film faster

We’ve now curated more than 8 million high-quality stock videos though partners such as Pond5, Rubberball, ATW Media, plus the stunning submissions of our global video creator community.

At Adobe MAX we unveiled a new partnership with GoPro that will bring thousands of hours of GoPro-captured footage to our library.

Try this: The next time you’re concepting (or budgeting) a shoot, take a quick spin through our library and you’ll find GoPro footage that spans from rural highways in Iceland, to shark dives in South Africa, to the snow-capped landscapes in British Columbia. All of this footage is available through subscription or individual download at a fraction of the cost of a one-way plane ticket to one of these remote/expensive shoot locales.

3. Animate content easier

When you think stock, you probably think of an ethnically diverse group of millennial models (playing professionals), who are hovering around a tablet pretending to collaborate. There’s a beautiful lens flare emanating from the office glass to the left. Everyone’s teeth are alarmingly white. You probably don’t think MOGRTs, aka motion graphic templates.

Design Army’s Pum Lefebure is a Picasso-esque master of turning stock material into art. Her session at Adobe MAX 2018, _“_Reimaging Stock as a Creative Weapon,” was a rallying cry for creatives ready to do so much more with so much less.

Pum and company are masters of jaw-dropping, animated Instagram content. Most brands would kill for the level of brilliance featured in Design Army’s own Instagram feed, let alone the work they do for clients.

Design Army doesn’t keep the secret to this content very secret though — it’s stock. From cutting the yellow egg yolk out of an Adobe Stock image to utilizing MOGRTs to expedite the animation process, their work isn’t stock, it’s epically constructed from stock.

Try This: We’ve made the application of animation templates in Adobe Stock a point-click process inside Adobe Premiere Pro. Simply navigate to your Graphics workspace, click on the Adobe Stock browser, find a template, and drag it in.