And I still keep getting these uneducated clients who will whip out a tear sheet from them or Annie and state "You can make my ad look just like that, right?? And for $500, right???
Maybe not for $500, but I'll bet that for a lot less you could get close enough to get the same results.
When I'm doing food shots, my stylist and I talk a lot about the "80/20 rule" -- you spend about 80 percent of your effort getting the last 20 percent of your results. In the world of gilded celebrity photographers, I'll bet it's more like a 99/1 rule... they spend 99 percent of the effort (and budget) getting the last one percent of the results. And the one question nobody wants to ask is whether that one percent is really going to generate any more revenue for client, because by that stage it's mostly a matter of vanity.
When I worked on the customer side, I used to raise the issue occasionally: "Yeah, we can make that change... how many additional cases do you think it's going to sell?" It was
not a popular question, because a lot of that spending is simply a way for a manager to put the spotlight on him/herself.
It's a curious fact that in spite of all the cost-cutting pressure in other areas, an important measure of your managerial prestige in Corporate America is how much money you get to spend chasing your personal whims: a wildly successful project that cost $10,000 doesn't add nearly as much to your executive aura as a mediocre-results project that cost $100,000.
A major part of the added value these hyper-expensive photographers added to their clientele was to provide a bigger, shinier, more impressive toilet down which to flush money; if that's not a goal, it's probably possible to generate similarly-effective photographic results for a lot less.