How Shutterstock Is Helping Media Organizations During Covid

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 illustrates the success of his tech-driven approach since his promotion to CEO last year. Below, in his own words, he explains the initiatives that redefined his company's market and client relationships. The challenge When nervous advertisers pulled their budgets during the pandemic, media organizations’ well-known business challenges became worse, leading to furloughs and even layoffs. On top of this, Covid-19 brought operational challenges, such as complicated protocols for sending reporters and photographers out into the world to cover breaking and trending news. Publishers and broadcasters—a major client segment for Shutterstock—needed a new, scalable approach for securing unique content that would ideally outlast the pandemic and provide differentiation in a crowded news market. The process To help our editorial clients address challenges exacerbated by the pandemic, we accelerated the launch of our own Newsroom, leveraging our network of 1,000-plus editorial photographers to cover stories. We assembled an in-house, global editorial team to assign stories based on around-the-clock social media and news monitoring of what’s trending—with assignments ranging from serious breaking news to high-interest entertainment features. This experienced team also develops news packages with follow-on angles to help publishers and broadcasters maximize engagement from popular stories. Take, for example, the recent news about Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez: After tracking massive interest in the couple’s split on social media, our editors mobilized to provide ancillary coverage, including her top performances of the last decade, her exes and who she’s likely to date next—all with relevant photos from our archives. Building this type of operation is one thing, but getting photos and stories into the hands of editors around the world in a timely manner is another, and it requires data and technology. We’ve developed an API to distribute breaking and trending content, which makes it immediately accessible to newsrooms. We also leverage our proprietary taxonomy to surface and package relevant images quickly—a process that would be cumbersome and cost-prohibitive if searches had to be conducted manually. Our tech-driven approach addresses a huge inefficiency in the marketplace, since the major photo services still typically take content related to big stories to market and negotiate with publishers’ sales teams, often selling to the highest bidder. For a popular story, a 24- or even 12-hour delay caused by negotiations can translate to hundreds of thousands of missed impressions and lost ad revenue. The takeaway As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a big believer in the platform economy. Companies that extend their reach through native integrations, app extensions and single sign-on agreements can dramatically increase their audience—provided the user experience they’ve created is sticky. You can only build something sticky if you’re certain that it provides value to your customers, and that only happens when you’re listening closely. In the case of our Newsroom, we heard that publishers and broadcasters were struggling to make their content stand out in an increasingly commoditized marketplace for popular news, and this situation was made worse by the pandemic. Instead of opening with a sales conversation every time we have something of value to offer, we made a long-term investment in our clients’ success, becoming their partner and an embedded part of their team in the process.

Columnist Network

How Shutterstock Is Helping Media Organizations Through Challenging Times

Shutterstock's Newsroom fills in the gaps laid bare during Covid

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Stan Pavlovsky

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Stan Pavlovsky