The Feed
Getty Images
Issue 28 | September 2013
Agency
R/GA London
Creative Team
VP, Executive Creative Director: James Temple VP, Executive Creative Director: George Prest Creative Director: Chris Williams
Production Team
Senior Producer: Steve Errey
Other Credits
Technical Director: Anthony Galvin Technology Project Lead: David Hamilton Group Planning Director: Kaihaan Jamshidi
Date
January 2013
Background
In the intensely competitive editorial photography market, Getty Images had lost saliency. The task was not just to try to make Getty Images relevant to media organisations but to get them top of mind.
Idea
Rather than create a traditional advertising campaign, R/GA London developed a utility that solved a problem for media groups and their picture editors.
The Feed was an innovative way in which Getty Images took iconic imagery as it emerged in social conversation and published it as it happened.
The feed listened to conversations, uncovered the most talked-about moments and sourced the perfect image to publish instantly on social networks. Real-time trends were instantly visualised. The Feed was launched exclusively in the UK by Wired Magazine and Fast Company in the US and was quickly hailed as genuinely new, different and valuable.
Results
This Feed had a three-fold effect – it reinforced perceptions of Getty Images as an innovator, and opened up new revenue streams for them with brands hungry for relevant content and make Getty Images’ content open and accessible for the masses in a channel they visit multiple times a day - Facebook. The Feed was beta-tested at the end of 2012, being released publicly in January 2013 to wide coverage in publications such as Wired and Mashable. The project achieved a PR value of over £3million in global press coverage and won several important creative awards.
Our Thoughts
In their book ‘Newsjacking’, outlined on ages 7-12 in this issue, Grant Hunter and Jon Burkhart list as one of the principles of Urgent Genius the ability to be able to create realtime advertising.
Like this.
In the case video, R/GA give the example of Cristiano Ronaldo scoring the winning goal for Real Madrid against Manchester City. In response to the huge spike in tweets in the moments after he scored, the Getty image of Ronaldo on his knees, arms raised in triumph, appeared in their Facebook Sports page timeline. Surprise, surprise, this was the picture which then got used most frequently by editors online and offline when they reported on the match.
The instructive part of this idea, then, is that the creative weren’t thinking like creative in advertising but like publishers.