Foap Launches Crowdsourced Photo 'Missions' For Brands

Brands are always looking for new and exciting ways to interact with fans, and Malmö-based Foap is leveraging their crowdsourced stock photo platform to run photo ‘missions’ for brands. The idea makes a lot of sense. Brands need new content all the time for marketing material, and a crowdsourced contest helps generate excitement and interaction.

As we’ve covered in the past, Foap is the next generation of a stock photo site, where anyone can submit their iPhone photography, tag it, and make it available for purchase. All photos then run for $10 to license, where the revenue is then split 50/50 between the photographer and Foap.

The way this new Missions feature works is pretty simple. A brand decides on a mission, such as ‘take a picture of our widget in the snow,’ and then pushes out that mission into their social media channels. Fans then upload these pictures through the Foap iPhone app. The brand then decides on a winner, who is rewarded with a cash prize, and will likely see their picture in marketing material.

So far they’ve grabbed names like Puma, Rebtel, Interflora, Hattrick, and Visit Sweden as ‘Mission’ partners.

This new model looks similar to Helsinki-based Scoopshot, which also crowdsources iPhone photography, but in a news context. Scoopshot’s model allows for journalists to select from newsworthy photos submitted to the app, or can alert iPhone photographers about events, so that they can be sure to get a shot.

But getting back to Foap, so far they’ve seen good traction. They’ve received 320,000 downloads, and 2.4 million images have been uploaded to the Foap market. So many images have been uploaded that they’ve implemented community features, where users vote on photos to be sure a certain level of quality remains on the site.

Last November, Foap raised $500,000 from Jade Global Investments, based in Asia. An Android app will be ready to download in the coming months.