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 <em>authentic</em> content, to help tell their story. Destination and place brands are no different. In fact most towns, cities, regions and nations on the planet have teams of people busy buying, licensing, creating and curating and sharing content, especially imagery, as you read this post.

Town vs town, city vs city, region vs region, nation vs nation?

For New Zealand towns, cities and regions, the survival and success of tourism and hospitality is vitally important to the local economy. Consequently the battle for visitors, and eyeballs, is fierce. <del></del>Almost all destination or place brands now maintain their own image library of some sort, for access by local businesses and the media to help tell the destination or place brand story. Many of these libraries include video and other content assets too.

Typically these libraries contain several hundred images and videos, which is a great start for many.

However the demand for content, especially visual content is insatiable, and marketing teams have the often daily task of acquiring content by all means possible, to feed the beast.

Tactics include: 

• commissioning photographers directly
• licensing imagery from existing photographers stock
• licensing imagery from larger stock libraries (such as [https://truestock.co.nz](True Stock), Getty and the like)
• cajoling local businesses to contribute their own photos to the town/city/region owned image library 
• searching social media channels, like Instagram, begging for republishing rights
• Some staffers will even go so far as to hop in the car and go take some photos on their iPhone, which is capable of producing a reasonable quality photo (with an authentic vibe and certainly good enough for social media)

It’s evident though that a lot of the content being collected and shared is common across destinations.

For example, a lot of <em>Tourism New Zealand’s</em> photography, available at https://visuals.newzealand.com, can be used to tell a regional destination story, or to promote a New Zealand town, city or region.

Brandkit (a well-established New Zealand headquartered company) has been supplying its image management software as a service, to destination marketing, pace branding and tourism promotion agencies for a number of years, and has developed a new way for organisations to share content.

Content Syndication

Each of Brandkit’s customers operates a unique account with its own independent Brand Portal and URL (e.g. https://visuals.newzealand.com

Users visit these unique websites to access and download photography, video and other content, all for free, provided they are using the content to promote the destination or place from whence it came.

For example users can login to the Dunedin Visual Library at https://dunedinnz.brandkit.io and access 5000 plus images and video assets, or the ChristchurchNZ Visual Library at https://toolkit.christchurchnz.com with 2000 plus images and video.

In this example, photography from these regions are naturally unique, but when telling a ‘New Zealand’ destination story, a storyteller is likely to use images from both regions. Alternatively if you were a tourism business such as a hotel chain, an airline, an inbound travel marketer, or the media wanting to the tell a travel story across New Zealand regions, cities or towns, you would want images from a mix of destinations.

For storytellers, writers, content creators and often foreign media, it can be hard to know where to go for official and authentic content.

This is where content syndication helps. For example, destination brands large and small can syndicate their images to an airline’s image library. Regional destination brands can syndicate their regional assets to the national promotion agencies such as Tourism NZ, who can act as a retail outlet to the world, while giving smaller regions a bit more control over their presence in the larger library.

The benefit for the larger libraries is that each contributing destination does the work of acquiring, tagging and licensing content, saving a lot of time and effort for busy marketing and content teams.

The worlds first Professional Creator to Destination Brand syndication?

Most content syndication is a collaboration between organisations with similar or identical objectives.

For example to drive interest and tourist visits to a destination, or a regional and national tourism promotion agency sharing content.However there’s a new kind of collaboration between libraries, and that is between the image libraries of <em>professional content creators</em> and destination brands.

In what could be a world first, Brandkit recently started a collaboration with Neat Places, a New Zealand company focused on creating both written and visual content for New Zealand’s ‘neat places’.

Neat Places has commercial arrangements in place with several NZ regional tourism organisations (RTO) and place brand organisations (PBO). They could be a local council or tourism promotion board. Once in place, the team at Neat Places gets on the road and scouts out various businesses and locations in the town, city or region, spending a week or two checking things out, trying the coffee, interviewing locals etc before writing things up, editing and curating a range of articles, reviews and photography.

 "...this is truly authentic local content from each destination...."

In essence this is truly authentic local content from each destination, created and curated by the NP team in a consistent on-brand way for each of their clients.

Neat Places operates its own Brandkit account. Once content is developed and approved by the destination brand client, the Neat Places crew upload that content to their own account, complete with appropriate tagging and licensing details.

The team at Brandkit then wire things up, explicitly selecting which accounts receive the syndicated content from Neat Places.The beauty of this collaboration is that the destination brand gets, typically, a few hundred additional images in their library to satisfy users’ thirst for destination content. All without lifting a finger.  And who doesn’t want more fresh and authentic content for their image library, without the work typically associated with organising and ingesting hundreds of images?

Meanwhile Neat Places get credit for the production of fantastic quality imagery and content, that destinations can use to tell an authentic brand story.Neat Places works exclusively across New Zealand at this stage.

However, acquiring more authentic visual content is a challenge for destination brands all around the globe. There are opportunities for other professional content creators and agencies to follow the Neat Places lead.

First up NZ destination brands

Kaikōura, Christchurch and Dunedin are the first destinations to accept syndicated content from Neat Places.

For example, Kaikōura is one of our smaller regions, with a relatively small team. The Neat Place syndication, means they now have double the imagery available for anyone wanting to tell the Kaikōura story, and they have been able to get the additional imagery published with minimal effort, which is a great outcome for them..

Many more collaborations and syndications to come

Neat Places is the first such collaboration, but David Vaassen, CEO/Founder at Brandkit expects more such collaborations across different industries in the future. “There’s no reason why this wouldn’t work equally well, for government agencies sharing content, or manufacturing/wholesale/retail collaborations on content,” says David.”

It’s a no-brainer. There are numerous obvious scenarios, a product brand who produces lovely product images, who distributes through local importers/distributors and wants to automatically have those images show up in the local distributors content library. A destination brand who wants their beautiful visuals to automatically show up in an airline’s content library. An attraction that wants a video of the latest experience to appear automatically in a Hotel’s content library. The list goes on.”—

If you want hundreds more authentic photos in your image library, brand portal or content hub, with less effort, that are professionally curated and managed, (as opposed to the headache of using Social Media UGC), check out <a href=”https://neatplaces.co.nz/“>Neat Places</a> for authentic content creation services, and <a href=”https://www.brandkit.io”>Brandkit</a> for content distribution automation.

Happy Branding :)</em>