Why it's OK to share publicity photos


I started my collection of historic Phoenix photos with publicity photos from Valley National Bank. They had been created to distribute to newspapers, etc. to promote the company. By the time I got there, it was becoming Bank One, and part of the job of the Marketing Department at that time was to clear out all of the old stuff that said Valley Bank. And it had been sitting there for years! The storage room had stuff that had been there since the building was new, in 1973, and like any storage area, no one had bothered to throw away old worthless stuff. But now that the name of the company was changing, anything that said Valley Bank had to go, including publicity photos. By the way, Valley Center, which was the Bank One Building when I was there in the '90s, is now Chase Tower. It's at Central and Monroe. Tallest building in Arizona, you can't miss it (I sound like a Marketing person, which I am!).

I've always been interested in Phoenix history, and it seemed a shame to throw all of these old photos into the dumpster, so I asked my manager for permission to take them home. I didn't need permission to share them, because they were publicity photos, and that's the whole point of publicity photos. I wouldn't have been much of a Marketing person if I didn't know that!

When the internet was new, I started posting these photos on web pages, and I carefully marked the names of the photographers, and studios, stamped on the back. Most of the photography studios were long since gone, the only exception being Markow, which is now Paul, the son of Bob Markow. I've known Paul for a long time, so I double-checked with him, letting him know what I was doing. Just professional courtesy.

I'm an old Marketing guy, and a Graphic Designer, so while I'm no expert on copyright, I know that publicity photos were meant to be seen. They were meant to be published giving "free advertising" to a company. They were given out in quantity, in the hopes that as many people as possible would se them. That's the whole point of publicity, which is part of the Marketing Mix, like advertising.

So it's OK to share publicity photos. That's what they're for. And now I just share them for fun.

Image at the top of this post: Valley Center (now Chase Tower) under construction in 1972. Valley National Bank Publicity photo.
Thank you to my patrons on Patreon who help support History Adventuring! If you like these blog posts, and would like to make suggestions for future ones, please go to patreon.com/Phoenix HistoryAdventuring where you can show your support for as little as $1 a month. Thank you!

What Patreon is http://bradhallart.blogspot.com/2016/03/supporting-creators-on-web-with-patreon.html

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is ...
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the...
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me...
Read more