Sometimes further is better.

It’s a well known fact that scarcity is an important aspect of selling. If there’s only one of something left in a store – you’re more inclined to feel like you might miss out.

As a photographer in the ad world you’d be forgiven for thinking you can’t create that kind of scarcity – it would be tacky.

But you can still do this in other ways.

One of them is to target people further afield.

When I was repping photographers, I quickly realised I needed to look further afield to get jobs for my photographers with larger usage, and therefore bigger budgets.

So I started with Australia, which was 3 hours away on a plane. But I forgot that Australia and New Zealand have a kind of sibling rivalry, and New Zealand is considered the ‘poor cousin’ (albeit quite a creative one).

It was actually much harder to get work from there than it was from Singapore, which, as it happens, has much bigger jobs anyway, even though it’s an 11 hour flight away.

In my experience the further away they are the more interesting or exotic you are.

And, regardless of which city you’re from, out-of-towners definitely seem to get priority when it comes to meetings, and are less likely to be cancelled, because you are there less.

When I went to Los Angeles art producers would often say ‘Just call when you’re in town’, which I did, and they’d always make time to see my photographers folios.

There are a few hurdles to be crossed if you want to break into new cities and markets, and that begins with understanding your own brand and who might pay for that. Then you can identify the best people and places to target, beyond your own back door.

But hey, it’s always worth going where you’ll be celebrated, not tolerated.

If you’d like help getting your head around targeting people further afield or identifying your brand, I have some free strategy call times available this week, before I disappear for a digital detox until end of September. You can jump on my calendar and find a time here.

Thank you to Hannah Caldwell for the airport image above. I’m writing this from a plane above the Arctic (apparently we had to go around Russia), on our way from Tokyo to London, where I’ll be when you receive this.