The Feed from Getty Images

Getty Images asked us to help them stand out in the highly competitive editorial photography market. They wanted to be front of mind for art buyers, picture editors and media organizations worldwide. So we created a destination that showcased their content as it happened.

The site presents Getty’s editorial content as a high impact stream of images from photographers worldwide. It’s a live demonstration of the breadth and quality of Getty’s content.

As a showcase destination it’s great, but as we were working on it, we saw a bigger opportunity for Getty to revolutionize their product and position themselves as innovators. Within three months, we had created The Feed.

The Feed is intended to reach art buyers, picture editors and media organizations worldwide, who may have overlooked Getty as their first go-to source because of the sheer volume of its content. We sought to design an experience that would help them do their jobs – selecting the best imagery for breaking world events – with greater speed and relevance.

For Getty, The Feed has reinforced their position as the number one source of editorial images and changed the way people think about the service they offer. It has also created a new revenue stream and generated over $10 million in global press coverage.

A subscription service that uses social listening to power real time image publishing, The Feed saves content managers from having to wait and search for content by serving up the perfect images in a real time stream direct to their social channels.

We developed a bespoke social listening algorithm (now patented by Getty) to be able to go deeper than just looking at trending topics to identify the peaks within conversations.

Imagine a big sporting event. In the build-up to it and during the event itself, it’s likely to be a trending topic. But during that time there will be hours of activity.

By actively listening to the conversation on Twitter, The Feed can pinpoint the exact moments everyone is talking about to serve up the perfect image to tell the story as it unfolds.

All Getty’s editorial images are graded and tagged as they come in by a team of content experts. This process gives each image really detailed metadata. Using the Getty Connect API, we are able to match this data with conversational peaks we pick up from social listening to find the most relevant, highest quality images.