{"id":1753,"date":"2011-04-23T10:09:14","date_gmt":"2011-04-23T01:09:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2011-04-23\/1753"},"modified":"2011-04-23T10:09:14","modified_gmt":"2011-04-23T01:09:14","slug":"the-amazing-marketing-power-of-scott-kelby","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2011-04-23\/1753","title":{"rendered":"The Amazing Marketing Power of Scott Kelby"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n
\nNOTE<\/b>: Images with an icon next to them have been artificially shrunk to better fit your screen; click the icon to restore them, in place, to their regular size.\n<\/div>\n\n\n

If you're not really into digital photography, you may have never heard\nof Scott Kelby<\/a>, but\nhe's quite the media dynamo in the on-line digital-photography world. He founded<\/span> a Photoshop<\/span> user's club some years ago, and seemingly has never\nrested since. As an example<\/span> of his business savvy, rather than launching\nthe club with a self<\/span>-limiting name like “Tampa Photoshop Users Club”, he\nsmartly called it the grandiose “National Association of Photoshop\nProfessionals”, and it took off. Since then, he's got writing credit on\ndozens of books and instructional videos, and leads a whole<\/span> self-titled\nmedia machine (Kelby Media Group<\/i>) that chimes in with insightful,\nwell-reasoned, and generally-upbeat commentary on every new development out\nthere, and makes its own new developments from time to time with its own\nnew product offerings. He's sort of<\/span> like the David Pogue<\/a> of the\ndigital-photography world.<\/p>\n\n

Scott's charisma, knowledge, and boundless energy has led him to become a\nwell<\/span>-followed go-to source of information for many in the\ndigital-photography world. What I find<\/span> amazing is that in a recent<\/span> blog\npost, it seemd obvious that he blatantly lied to his readership while shilling a product<\/span>\nhe was connected to, and nobody seemed to care.<\/i> Now that's<\/i>\nmarketing power!<\/b><\/p>\n\n

Yesterday, Scott published a post titled “Breaking News: Imagine having Layers in Lightroom. Well, OnOne Software Just Did it!!<\/i><\/a>”<\/p>\n\n

If you're not familiar with the subject, the technology he's suggesting\nhas just been made possible would be a huge<\/span> leap for photo editing\nworkflow, and would overcome one of the major drawbacks of how programs\nlike Adobe Lightroom and Apple Aperture allow you to work with your photos. It's a leap<\/span> that many expect to be made sometime in the future (in five\nyears?), but Scott's telling us that it's available now(!), via a software<\/span>\nprogram he helped develop.<\/p>\n\n

The initial comments on his blog post were from folks who took him at his word....\n“I've been waiting for this<\/i>”...\n“Hooray!!!!!!!!!!!!<\/i>”...\n“Now this looks interesting!<\/i>”...\n“Great job, OnOne<\/i>”...<\/p>\n\n

The only problem is that it's not true.<\/p>\n\n

I'm more engineer than photographer, and particularly as an author of dozens of plugins for\nLightroom<\/a>, the technological unlikelihood of his claim was immediately\napparent. I followed<\/span> the link to the software's site to check out just how\ndeep the integration with Lightroom really was.... and found\nnothing<\/b>. No mention<\/span> whatsoever about how the Lightroom integration\nwas handled. If it was<\/span> truly “Layers in Lightroom”, that would have been\ndemonstrated up front with flashing neon, because it indeed would have been\na major<\/span> accomplishment.<\/p>\n\n

From a technological standpoint, this was quite a ho<\/span>-hum development.\nBasically, he's created a super<\/span>-lite version of Photoshop that, like any\nother application, can be called from Lightroom to work on a copy<\/span> of a\nphoto.<\/span> Its benefit<\/span> seems to be a very<\/span> simple user interface and it will\ncertainly appeal to non-technical photographers that want more\npixel-editing functionality than Lightroom provides, but it's of no\ninterest if you already use Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Paint Shop Pro,\nGimp, or any of the other myriad of pixel-editing applications out\nthere.<\/p>\n\n

Once people started to realize this, comments started appearing that\ncited the destructive nature of the edits. Here, “destructive” refers to\nthe fact that making edits actually changes pixel values, destroying the\nability to go back and undo or tweak the changes. Photoshop is a\ndestructive<\/span> editor, while Lightroom and Aperture are purely\nnon-destructive, which is a major<\/span> point of appeal.<\/p>\n\n

Anyway, comments starting coming in citing this huge shortcoming, and\nthen people started whining about the price (the announced price is double\nthat for the much-more-powerful Photoshop Elements). But what really<\/span>\nsurprised me is that no one (but me) called him out for what certainly seemed to be a bald-faced\nlie.<\/p>\n\n

I'm sure that Scott knows full well that it's not “Layers in\nLightroom” because he's an expert in this stuff in general and he\nhelped develop this specific product, but perhaps the marketing potential\nof the lie was just too tempting to pass up.<\/p>\n\n

My trust in him evaporated in an instant.<\/p>\n\n

But I seem to be the only one. Is everyone<\/span> else drinking his Kool-Aid? Does he have a reality\ndistortion field<\/a> that only I have<\/span> escaped?<\/p>\n\n

He really is a marketing genius (well, except for the whole lying thing).\nWhen I first<\/span> saw the post and went to the application's site, it featured a picture<\/span>\nof a smiling<\/span> Scott Kelby pitching the software. At least<\/span> I think<\/span> it did... when I go<\/span> now,\nhe's been reduced to a bullet<\/span>-point mention. It's interesting<\/span> to see the difference in the\nsite when visiting via\nhis link<\/a>\nand a\nvanilla link<\/a>. Besides some marketing text, the whole\npurchase presentation is different.... if you come from Scott's link, you're not offered the option to buy the not-yet-available software, and the “pricing” link\nmentions that it will cost $160 when it comes out. But if you<\/span> come in via the vanilla link, you're offered the ability to\nbuy their whole suite of software for $500. Seems sort of odd, but then, I've never understood marketing.<\/p>\n\n

I wonder what Seth Godin<\/a>\nwould say? Actually, I don't,<\/span> because I already<\/span> know, as anyone with\na conscience<\/span> would.<\/p>\n\n

There's a silver lining in this, though... it got me thinking about how\nto do layers in Lightroom, and I've devised a relatively<\/span> simple (but slow)\nway to mimic layers within Lightroom to a strong<\/span> degree.... one that\npreservers the non-destructive workflow that's so integral to Lightroom. I\ndon't<\/span> know whether I have<\/span> the pixel-editing technical skill to bring it to\nfruition, but I know<\/span> what I'm going to be working on for the next while....\n\ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n\n

UPDATE:<\/b> I did<\/span> it<\/a><\/p>\n\n

UPDATE #2:<\/b> Scott responded to the criticism in a video,<\/span> where he succeeded in being even more misleading than the first time<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you're not really into digital photography, you may have never heard of Scott Kelby, but he's quite the media dynamo in the on-line digital-photography world. He founded a Photoshop user's club some years ago, and seemingly has never rested since. As an example of his business savvy, rather than launching the club with a self-limiting name like \"Tampa Photoshop Users Club\", he smartly called it the grandiose \"National Association of Photoshop Professionals\", and it took off. Since then, he's got writing credit on dozens of books and instructional videos, and leads a whole self-titled media machine (Kelby Media Group) [...]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,13,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1753"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1753"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1753\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}