Situation

The marketing at Getty Images was not broken. The company had #1 marketshare and footholds around the globe offering a family of brands with different price points and business models. But the company also knew it likely could be doing better as competition intensified.

 

Task

I was hired to be Getty's VP of Digital Marketing with a primary focus on customer acquisition. With a team of 30 dispersed across three countries, I inherited a smart group of marketers, but they were hampered by a siloed structure and a pervasive sense that they lacked empowerment to act. The $50 million paid media budget was fragmented and relatively opaque across geographies, product lines, and media engagement channels (paid social, affiliate, search, display).

​

What I did

After conducting a rapid assessment of the company's current state, identifying some initial candidates for improving ways of working, ad tech modernization, agency use and media planning, I convened the team for a series of design-thinking exercises to reinvent customer acquisition marketing.

Changes included introducing meetings and dashboard tools to keep all team members abreast of marketing activities individually and collectively. Agency roles were adjusted and the roster was consolidated. Research was conducted to better understand customer perceptions of Getty's offerings relative to those of direct and indirect competitors; those insights were applied to reposition each of those entities in the marketplace.

 

In addition, a series of experiments were launched to identify new ways to pursue prospective customers with rapid rollouts of MVPs that generated tangible impact, e.g. expanding the global affiliate marketing program, which at that time was rare for B2B companies to pursue.

​

​

​