I'm sorry, but I find this attitude really bizarre. You seem to confuse marketing with advertising, and even then it still feels bizarre. How are people meant to discover products, or solutions to their problems?
This never used to bother me either, but there are certain things that once you've seen, you can't unsee.
Smiling people is one of them. If your marketing site has pictures of smiling people on it, I am immediately turned off. Look at the billboard on your local subway system. Ads for dentists, graduate degrees, Trident gum, upcoming plays. 9 out of 10 of them have a stock photo of a smiling person, presumably unable to contain their enjoyment of $PRODUCT.
In very rare cases, say, for a Meetup group, or a bike tour, will I see pictures of smiling people that are actually organic. That's fine. It's when they use stock photos that it insults my intelligence and makes me feel like "marketers lying to take my money". The photos aren't even of people paid to pretend to enjoy the product, they're just sub-licensed from Getty. What it tells me is they're more concerned with sales driven by emotion than making a substantive first impression.
To test this, I just thought of the most boring thing I could think of: enterprise resource planning. The first marketing result on Google is this, complete with smiling person:
The best salespeople in the world make you walk away thinking you got a great deal, that you got the upper hand. When I see these blatant plays for emotion, I walk away disgusted.
Smiling people is one of them. If your marketing site has pictures of smiling people on it, I am immediately turned off. Look at the billboard on your local subway system. Ads for dentists, graduate degrees, Trident gum, upcoming plays. 9 out of 10 of them have a stock photo of a smiling person, presumably unable to contain their enjoyment of $PRODUCT.
In very rare cases, say, for a Meetup group, or a bike tour, will I see pictures of smiling people that are actually organic. That's fine. It's when they use stock photos that it insults my intelligence and makes me feel like "marketers lying to take my money". The photos aren't even of people paid to pretend to enjoy the product, they're just sub-licensed from Getty. What it tells me is they're more concerned with sales driven by emotion than making a substantive first impression.
To test this, I just thought of the most boring thing I could think of: enterprise resource planning. The first marketing result on Google is this, complete with smiling person:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/dynamics/erp.aspx
The best salespeople in the world make you walk away thinking you got a great deal, that you got the upper hand. When I see these blatant plays for emotion, I walk away disgusted.