Taking stock of stock photos: Jellyfish, private jets and more

Eating jellyfish can cure a lot of ailments, if you believe some shady-looking online ads.
The same stock photo of a small round jellyfish on a man’s palm has been used to sell male performance boosters and high blood-pressure medicine.
The stock photo is available from Shutterstock, 123rf and BigStock, among others.

A company called Force Factor is behind the ubiquitous online advertisements. You can see a bunch of their ads here.
Force Factor manufactures nutritional supplements for men to build muscle and increase testosterone. Tachmorn Marketing ran a critique of the company’s ads in a blog post.

Force Factor also uses attractive women to sell its male performance enhancement products.
In one series of ads, it uses a photo of a pretty blonde on a tennis court. This is a stock photo available from Dreamstime and others.
I’ve seen that same photo used to sell a sleep aid for another company.

And finally, here’s an ad for a get rich scheme that uses a man posing beside a private jet. The ad says “How Penny Stocks Create Millionaires.”

I tracked the photo down to Innovative Photography of Utah. The photo in question was taken in 2009, according to a post on Vimeo.