Marketing Australia – February-March 2019

MARKETING 2019

Y

ou’ve heard it before,

there’s no need to

repeat it. Content’s

place in the marketing

aristocracy has been

all but proven over and over. It’s one

of those funny things, a little bit of

a science and a little bit of art – to

most, that is. Grant Munro, senior vice

president of Shutterstock Custom

(formerly known as Flashstock), tells

Marketing about his methodical

approach to breaking down content

into its core elements and how his

custom content business got picked

up by one of the biggest stock

photography companies in the world.

Marketing: How did Shutterstock

Custom come to be?

Grant Munro: One of the constants

was content. When you were doing

a TV commercial and a few print

pieces, everything was pretty

straightforward and everything

was optimised against creating that

content. Team structure, agency

structure, was all pretty established

and pretty static. So when these

new channels came up it really

threw everyone for a loop. Nothing

changed from a budget perspective

and that tension was really apparent.

I started Flashstock on that insight.

I remember being in a meeting

with a bunch of BlackBerry folk.

BlackBerry was one of our

bigger clients. It was pivoting from

the enterprise device – like bankers

would use – to the consumer device,

which it obviously didn’t do very

well. But it was spending so much

money on promotion, and part of

that was trying to reposition it as

a lifestyle device. It was doing a

tonne of high production shoots in

marketingmag.com.au

The science of stock

There’s content, and then there’s this. Grant Munro tells Marketing how

Shutterstock Custom is cutting the corporate crap and turning content

marketing into a pure science. By Josh Loh.

different locations around the world.

One of the locations it was planning

for was in Iceland to capture skiing

scenarios – millions of dollars on the

production side. I went on vacation

to Chile to go skiing around the

same time; it was August. Chile’s like

the place to ski in August. It’s one of

the only places in the world that’s

top-notch [during that period]. So

you had all these professional skiers

and ski teams, and everybody was

capturing content, so I thought if I

could connect BlackBerry directly

with this group of people, they could

basically just share all the content

they’re already creating.

That really started the engine

for Flashstock; it was a platform to

help automate a lot of the workfl ow,

the data and the analytics around

creating content – coupled with a

global network of creators.

Grant Munro, senior

vice president of

Shutterstock Custom

56 INTERVIEW