Dear Pond5 Artists,
A few days ago, I captured the photo below, showing New Yorkers waiting in line for coffee while respecting 6 feet of interpersonal distance. These are scary and unprecedented moments we are all currently living through. Pond5 has instituted a work-from-home policy across all three of our global offices, and we hope and encourage all of you to be safe and to respect your local directives on social distancing.
This will mean disruption for us all. I live in a small New York apartment with my wife, who also works full time and our two-and-a-half year old daughter whose daycare is closed. We’ve been sharing parenting duties while still trying to get all our work done in very tight quarters. I’ve been forced to take many work calls in the bathroom! Thankfully, we still have our health, which is the most important thing. Many others around us are not so lucky.
So while these are turbulent times, and everyone will see fluctuations in their business due to the halted global economy, I thought I’d reach out directly to share with you some of the things we’re hearing from within the industry and pass along some info from the buy-side of the market that can help focus your efforts and keep you creating and earning.
Air travel restrictions and limits on the size of gatherings have put a halt to location-based shooting. However, content will still need to be produced to feed the record levels of media consumption on television, streaming and social media that we’re seeing as a result of stay-at-home orders. As a result, TV production is being forced to shift quickly from scripted content to factual programs.
This increase in news, archival and documentary programming will mean a subsequent rise in interest for stock media relevant to those categories. Additionally, networks may lean into programming that relies heavily on CGI. So think about what you can (safely) shoot, render, or might have already sitting on hard drives that fits these criteria.
Also, be sure to include shoot location info in your metadata. Historically, many buyers look for this data when deciding what to license for different reasons like complying with SAG obligations or funding a show by ensuring that content was shot locally. Because we expect to see a significant pivot from the TV production community away from location shooting, providing location data on your media is going to become even more important as buyers want to ensure that they are using content that is factually relevant and geographically specific.
Finally, if you capture media that reflects the current pandemic, or tangential issues like economic hardship, scarcity or social distancing, let us know when you upload by shooting an email to Support@pond5.com – we’ll consider your work for one of our Coronavirus homepage collections.
We’ll do our part, too. Rest assured that in spite of global conditions, you can continue to count on the following things from Pond5:
- Our work-from-home curatorial team will ingest and review your content at the same, industry-leading rate
- We will continue to be available, as before, through our world-class Support Team
- Our Creative Partner Team is remote and firing on all cylinders – pushing and upselling your content to our Enterprise clients
- Product and Engineering teams are still hard at work speeding up the site, making U/X enhancements and improving the ease with which e-commerce buyers can purchase your content
Thanks for being a part of our community. Now, stay safe and stay creative!
Greg Andreacchi
Director, Head of Artists & Content
