Foap, the iPhone app that lets users upload and sell their photos through the startup’s stock photo marketplace, has followed through on its promise to open up the service to brands (yes, that word again) who want to use the platform as a form of engagement marketing, while also offering another avenue for keen “iPhoneographers” to get paid.
It’s also announcing that Puma, Rebtel, Interflora AB, Hattrick, and VisitSweden have signed up as brand partners.
Dubbed “Foap Missions”, brands define a photographic brief (e.g. take a picture of X in Y) and set a cash prize for the winning entry. They then push this “mission” out to their existing community channels and through Foap itself. Users are asked to upload photos via the Mission section of the app, which brands can access via the service’s dashboard.
Interestingly, only photos that receive a user rating of 2.5/5 or above — the same cowdsourced filtering employed by the main Foap marketplace — show up in the brand’s dashboard.
After the mission deadline closes, the brand selects a winner and can also purchase any of the entries for use in their campaigns at the same $10 a pop that Foap normally charges; the photographer gets a 50% cut of any sale.
However, despite co-founder David Los calling the feature a “game changer” for social media and the stock photo industry, the whole photo missions concept as a form of engagement marketing isn’t an entirely new one. Mobile photo sharing app EyeEm, for example, launched a similar initiative last November, signing up Red Bull and the airline Lufthansa. The difference here though is that users actually get paid — EyeEm isn’t a marketplace like Foap, but competes more along the lines of Instagram.
Meanwhile, Foap is putting out some updated numbers: It says that the app has now been downloaded 320,000 times and photo uploads have reached 2.4 million (up from the 150,000 downloads and 1.4m photo submissions cited four months ago).
