The science of stock

You’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