Why I decided to use only real photos for a pet-care brand.
I work on marketing for Calma Animals, a pet-care brand. Part of that job is product visuals: showing what the product is, how it works, what it looks like in a real home. And of course there is the question of using AI for that.
One side of it: you can do it well, and I have. The renders come out in good quality and the product looks right. The only real friction is that in ads and posts you now have to label the material as AI-generated. That is manageable.
The buyer is a person, and the product is for someone they love.
The other side is the one that stuck with me. This is a consumer product for animals. The decision is made by a human, for a creature that depends on them. The whole pitch rests on trust. And the fastest way to lose that trust is to be caught showing a product that was never actually in the room.
So for organic communication I decided on a simple rule: real photos only, at least for everything that shows what the product is and how it works. Not to dodge the AI label, and not to sneak anything past anyone. The opposite. In a feed where everything is generated, a plain, slightly imperfect photo of the actual thing reads as human, and human reads as honest.
A philosophical rule, not a technical one.
I don’t think generated images are bad. I use them elsewhere and will keep doing so. But when the product exists to help, and the customer is choosing on behalf of someone who cannot choose for themselves, I want the visuals to carry the same weight as the promise. You cannot build trust with something that was never real. So we photograph the product, and we show it the way it is.