Latinstock Brazil, focussing on digital
Here’s the first in a series of company profiles we will be publishing. We will talk to media licensing agencies across the globe to provide insight into their services but also to show you the people behind the websites. For this first profile we talked to Marco Schellinga, CEO and partner at Latinstock Brazil.
When did Latinstock Brazil start?
Latinstock Brazil has been active in the country since 1988 and joined the Latinstock group in 1992. It had to move from a traditional stock agency to one that was completely digital. Since the beginning the company invested heavily in technology due to the uniqueness of the language that made us develop our own thesaurus and indexing system, leading to the development of a platform able to host millions of images.
What does the company do?
Latinstock is a content supplier for the advertising and editorial markets of Latin America.
What countries do you operate in?
Most of Latin America, including branches in, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Venezuela and Uruguay.
What are your most important products or services?
Stock photography, archive of film stock for advertising agencies and multimedia producers and photo assignments can also be arranged.
What makes you unique?
Latinstock Brazil became the only stock agency able to compete in quite the same league as Getty Images in Brazil, due to its own website and uniqueness of the represented collections. In 2008 we saw a major shift in sales from advertising to editorial where we could supply the market with news images, including Reuters, The New York Times, Redux, and Red Cover. We also catered for the text book market, supplying to Corbis, AKG, Science Photo Library and Minden Pictures among others. We are also starting to represent a few selected micro-stock agencies such as Shutterstock.
What will you invest in next?
In 2005 Latinstock started a Digital division, this area was created to develop new opportunities with all the knowledge acquired during the changes and adaptations that it had to undergo while digitizing and building its own platform. This helped Latinstock learn all angles and importance of digital asset management. This in turn helped content producers like advertising agencies and production companies to get the best of the Internet to create, distribute and adapt its content.
The first opportunity was on content logistics, help content producer like ad. Agencies, production companies and advertiser to get best of the Internet to create, distribute and adapt it content, for the last 5 years Latinstock Digital has had a strong partnership with BEAM.TV(www.beam.tv), it became the most important hub for content distribution to or from Latin America, what had started with small TV commercials and now it is a operation that distributes large content like soap operas, feature films, standard or high definition, one would naively say that it is just file transfer, it is, but it is also knowledge about audiovisual content structure and how connect people and companies. This is something that only a company that has more than 40 international partner for more than 20 years knows very well. Recently Latinstock Digital made a new move, maybe one that is as important as it’s first steps on the late 80’s , it signed a partnership with KIT Digital (www.kitd.com) to manage it businesses for Latin America, KIT it is today the most complete platform to IPTV in the world and due to Latinstock’s experience with digital content handling KIT Digital found Latinstock the perfect partner to be with for the Latin America market.
What is the biggest threat to your industry?
The universal fall in sales of stock photography. We are aware that we have to look into other directions in order to provide services that will replace the dwindling sales of stock photography in general. By opening Latinstock Digital we are able now to provide the transport, storage, and administration of digital material in any format it being feature films, commercials, TV programming, IPTV as well supplying content for these “new” media products, from internet to cellular phones.
Also the variety of the imagery offered was very positive during a year when a dramatic drop in advertising sales (30%) was offset by a healthy growth in the editorial market (45%).
How are you dealing with change?
By digitising our whole collection. This was started by Latinstock Brazil when we pulled our whole group together by aiming to go 100% digital. This was a monumental move with a development of a single website to host all our different branches. The digital age has made this necessary and it does prove much easier to deal with client requests when everything is digital. The universal fall in sales of stock photography. We are aware that we have to look into other directions in order to provide services that will replace the dwindling sales of stock photography in general. By opening Latinstock Digital we are able now to provide the transport, storage, and administration of digital material in any format it being feature films, commercials, TV programming, IPTV as well supplying content for these “new” media products, from internet to cellular phones.
Also the variety of the imagery offered was very positive during a year when a dramatic drop in advertising sales (30%) was offset by a healthy growth in the editorial market (45%).