How to get hundreds of authentic photos for your image library with zero effort
Visuals make the world go around. Every brand today wants more authentic content to help tell their story. Destination and place brands are no different. Most towns, cities, regions, and nations have teams actively acquiring, curating, and sharing content, especially imagery, to promote their destinations.
Town vs. town, city vs. city, region vs. region, nation vs. nation?
For New Zealand towns, cities, and regions, tourism and hospitality are vital to the local economy. Consequently, the competition for visitors and attention is fierce.
Many destination brands maintain their own image libraries to provide local businesses and media with resources to help tell their stories. These libraries typically house hundreds of images and videos—a good start for many—but the demand for content, especially visuals, is insatiable.
Tactics for acquiring content:
- Commissioning photographers.
- Licensing imagery from photographers or stock libraries like True Stock and Getty.
- Encouraging local businesses to contribute photos.
- Searching social media for republishing rights.
- Taking photos in-house using smartphones for social media-friendly content.
Despite these efforts, much of the content collected is common across destinations. For instance, Tourism New Zealand’s photography can be used to tell regional destination stories.
Content Syndication
Each of Brandkit’s customers operates a unique account with an independent Brand Portal and URL (e.g., visuals.newzealand.com).
Users can log in to these portals to access and download photography, videos, and other content for free—provided the content is used to promote the destination it represents.
Examples:
- Dunedin Visual Library with 5000+ assets.
- ChristchurchNZ Visual Library with 2000+ assets.
Syndication benefits:
- Regional assets can be syndicated to national promotion agencies, like Tourism NZ, which act as global outlets for smaller regions.
- Large libraries save time as contributing destinations handle content acquisition, tagging, and licensing.
The world’s first Professional Creator-to-Destination Brand syndication?
Brandkit recently collaborated with Neat Places, a New Zealand company creating written and visual content for the country’s “neat places.”
How it works:
- Neat Places collaborates with regional tourism organisations (RTOs) or place brand organisations (PBOs).
- Their team explores local destinations, writes articles, and creates visual content.
- The content is uploaded to Neat Places’ Brandkit account with proper tagging and licensing.
- Brandkit wires up syndication to destination brand accounts, providing these destinations with hundreds of new, authentic images effortlessly.
Example:
Kaikōura, one of New Zealand’s smaller regions, doubled its available imagery through Neat Places’ syndication.
More collaborations to come
Neat Places is just the beginning. Brandkit CEO David Vaassen envisions similar collaborations across industries:
“There’s no reason why this wouldn’t work equally well for government agencies, manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers.”_
Examples:
- A product brand syndicating imagery to local distributors.
- A destination brand sharing visuals with airlines.
- An attraction syndicating video content to hotels.
Why Brandkit?
Brandkit is a modern DAM with Brand Portal superpowers, offering account-to-account content syndication.
If you want hundreds of authentic photos for your image library with minimal effort, check out Neat Places for content creation services and Brandkit for content distribution automation.
Happy Branding! :)
How to get hundreds of authentic New Zealand photos for your image library with zero effort
Visual make the world go round. Every brand today wants more authentic content, to help tell their story. Brandkit is collaborating with NZ content creation specialist, Neat Places, to make it effortless to get fresh content assets into Brandkit powered image libraries, with its new “Content Syndication” powers.
