How Shutterstock Hired More Diverse Creators

Editor’s note: This piece is part of our Columnist Network series, which explores the tactical thoughts and actions from Adweek’s community of high-level experts. Today, Shutterstock’s Stan Pavlovsky reflects on his first few months of being CEO when the need for content accelerated. Below, in his own words, he discusses sifting through an immense quantity of content. The challenge When the pandemic hit, we saw demand for the content skyrocket—and not just from our existing customer base. The pandemic spurred the acceleration of digital across all verticals and business types. Suddenly, every small business owner was a digital creator in need of content to tell their brand story, and every large brand advertiser found its traditional production process disrupted. The pandemic spurred the acceleration of digital across all verticals. The process I became CEO of Shutterstock a few weeks into the pandemic. Our executive team had already been focused on democratizing access to all types of content, including music, editorial video and archival content, and even 3D and immersive content. With the pandemic, however, packaging our immense library of content into a variety of subscription sizes and price points became mission critical. We quickly launched a variety of new subscription offerings to help first-time creators source the imagery and footage they needed to create websites, program social channels and communicate with their customers. We started offering free weekly image downloads to help ease the economic burden on smaller businesses, and we purchased Amper, an AI-powered music composition platform, as well as TurboSquid, a leading 3D marketplace, to help make custom music and immersive content accessible to anyone. Our larger shift to a subscription model showed great momentum—last fall alone, we saw subscriptions jump 45% year over year. We also expanded the way we work with larger brands, since their needs changed, too. The pandemic had upended their traditional creative process. With travel severely limited, brands couldn’t simply fly in their favorite production team to shoot a TV commercial. With social distancing and Covid-19 concerns, in-person shoots themselves were also challenging. In talking with enterprise clients, we recognized their need for in-market talent, and a distributed network of artists, creatives and production teams. We launched Shutterstock Studios to grant brands access to these additional resources, providing end-to-end custom content services during a time when they needed it most. In order to help feed our customers’ growing need for high-quality content, we had to bring the world’s best artists and art to our platform. We launched grants to bring more diverse creators to Shutterstock, and invested in our editorial video and archival content, which saw surging demand during the past year. The takeaway By being flexible with our pricing strategy and packages, as well as working hard to democratize access to an increasing variety of content formats, we were able to not only stay relevant, but also to stay one step ahead. Customers had a growing need for high-quality content.

Columnist Network

How Shutterstock Kept Up With Content Demands and Hired More Diverse Creators

CEO Stan Pavlovsky looks back at pandemic production

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Stan Pavlovsky

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Stan Pavlovsky