Today, the best brands are connecting with their audiences by developing content that delicately balances authentic storytelling and imaginative visuals.
For our sixth installment of the Summit series, we curated a virtual conference highlighting what #ThePowerOfAMoment means to 10+ creative brand marketing leaders working across various industries from professional sports to higher education to nonprofits.
Continue reading to learn more about the 2022 PhotoShelter Summit speakers!
Documenting The LA Rams’ 2022 Road to Victory
Brevin Townsell may only be in his third season as Team Photographer for the Super Bowl LVI Champions Los Angeles Rams, but he’s no rookie to professional sports photography.
Prior to joining the Rams, he spent a season with the Seattle Seahawks. Before that, he worked in the Iowa State University Athletics Department as a Media Team Photographer and Social Media Lead, all while juggling being a full-time student.
“My journey in photography started during my first year working at Iowa State as a sophomore digital media intern. On the very first football game of the season, my boss handed me a camera asking if I could capture a few extra photos that we could use for social—from then on I fell in love.”
Brevin Townsell, Los Angeles Rams Team Photographer
Brevin kicked off The PhotoShelter Summit —sharing an inside look at what it’s been like documenting the Los Angeles Rams’ road to victory for the past three seasons. From community events to marketing initiatives, and eventually spotlighting the “Super Bowl champions in their own stadium.”
Follow The Rams on Twitter and Instagram, and check out the full range of Brevin’s work on his website.
Back to the Madness: Documenting The New Era of College Sports
Everyone, everywhere knows how Covid affected us all, but it’s hard for the average individual to imagine how performers and athletes experienced the pandemic. The NCAA Photo Team had a unique opportunity to see and document that change, so they shared it with us during The PhotoShelter Summit.
Jamie Schwaberow, Owner of Clarkson Creative and NCAA Photos’ Director of Photography and C. Morgan Engel, Staff Photographer for NCAA Photos discussed how their approach to covering #MarchMadness shifted before and after the “Covid bubble,” and how they adjusted their content production and distribution workflows to accommodate their team, partners, and audience’s content needs.
Jamie developed his professional photography skills in the late ‘90s working at the 1996 Olympic Games and the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. From there he pursued a career in photojournalism, which eventually led to an opportunity to begin working as a team photographer for the Denver Broncos and Colorado Rockies. From there, he joined the NCAA Photos team as a staff photographer and developed his professional skills to eventually become the Director of NCAA Photos in 2001. To date, he’s covered over 200 championships! Can you imagine how many iconic images he’s personally documented?!
For C. Morgan Engel, his career in sports photography has been marked by his travels across the country. “My background in sports photography has taken me from Texas to the Minnesota Vikings, a summer camp in rural Maine, and the Los Angeles Chargers. Now that I’m on staff with NCAA Photos, my travels around the country continue to photograph collegiate athletes during one of their most memorable moments—competing for a National Championship. I feel proud to have led our coverage of many women’s championships including the DI Women’s Final Four, Women’s College World Series, and DI Women’s Gymnastics,” he shared.
Follow the NCAA Photographers on Instagram and check out both Jamie and C. Morgan’s portfolios on their websites.
Women in Focus: PhotoShelter’s CRO + SVP of Product in Conversation
Two executive leaders at PhotoShelter, Deanna Nelson, Chief Revenue Officer and Monika Smyzcek, Senior Vice President of Product, briefly discussed how their respective teams connect with our customers and use customer feedback to inform platform and product innovation.
Want to pull the curtain back further to go behind the scenes of PhotoShelter’s product innovation process? Watch ‘The Strategy Behind A PhotoShelter Future’ on-demand now to learn more about PhotoShelter’s WCAG-compliant portal features, and other platform improvements and integrations coming soon!
Sailing the World for 50 Years: Creating the PLL Media Archive and Golden Globe Race Legacy
Come feed your wanderlust and see what the entire globe looks like from the bow of a boat sailing around the world! In this session, Barry Pickthall shares the content marketing and distribution strategies he’s established to improve workflow efficiencies and increase his photo agency’s profits. Plus, you’ll also get a sneak peek at the largest archive of images from the very first solo non-stop sail around the globe in 1969!
Barry Pickthall has been The Times of London’s Senior Sports Reporter for the past 50 years and the yachting correspondent for the past 25 years. To say he could probably row laps around any professional sports reporter would be an understatement. Recently, his photo agency–PPL Media began building its massive archive of videos and images in the PhotoShelter for Brands digital asset management platform, so he’ll be sharing how frictionless asset access through PhotoShelter helped his agency generate $185 million in global media coverage during the 2022 Golden Globe race.
Check out the PPL Media website to see the full range of Barry and his team’s work.
The G2 Key to Superfans: How to Build Community and Brand Love
Everyone has a community, but the biggest question brand marketing teams try to answer with creative strategies and tactics is: How do you galvanize them? G2 started as a beta program with under 100 users.
Now, the company boasts a growing database of over 1.8 million product and platform reviews.
To demonstrate how performance metrics and social listening affect their community development and content marketing strategies and tactics, Mike Puglielli, G2’s Brand and Creative Director discussed the successful launch of the G2 Icons Program.
Mike Puglielli is a brand and creative director with over 13 years of experience leading global B2B and B2C brand creative teams across fortune and high-growth startup companies.
Check out the G2 website, follow them on Twitter, or follow Mike on LinkedIn.
How Higher Education Communities Amplify Connection Through Collaboration
Craig Bisacre
Imagine being tasked with developing a robust visual storytelling strategy for 18 Division 1 teams of approximately 600 student-athletes, over the course of a year–or four years.
That’s Craig Bisacre’s job as Director of Photography for Texas A&M University’s Athletics Department. Since 2019, the average time it takes one college student to graduate—plus a pandemic and the rise and popularity of NIL deals, Craig has been focusing his lens on documenting the evolution of these student athletes’ impressive talents.
During his PhotoShelter Summit session, Craig shows and tells how the Aggies’ winning combination of talented, tenacious team members and powerful tech tools like PhotoShelter’s Wireless FTP Flow, Fileflow, and INFLCR work in tandem to deliver content in real-time to fuel their fans and their student-athletes social influence and NIL contracts.
Craig is a proud “Army Brat”—crediting 11 different military moves, including living abroad in South Korea, for his resiliency. He graduated with a B.A. in Photojournalism from George Mason University in Virginia but says his “passion for photography is ever-changing. I love the challenge of being able to visually tell the story of a split-second moment, without any words and I constantly strive to produce unique and engaging images that incorporate the true beauty of sports that are encapsulated way beyond just the game.” Before moving to Texas where he currently lives, he was the Head Photographer at Indiana University Athletics from 2017 to 2019. Prior to that, he was the Assistant Photographer for the University of Tennessee Athletics from 2015 to 2017.
Keep up with the latest Texas A&M Athletics news on Twitter and Instagram, and check out Craig’s work on his website.
Molly Glynn
From creative concept ideation and development to archiving, Molly Glyn, Villanova University’s Photography Manager does it all to manage the school’s visual storytelling strategy. She handles shoot production on major events, stock, headshot, and publication photography. With a background in photo editing and retouching, she helps to bridge the needs of campus partners with the creative mindsets of photographers.
One of the main goals of The PhotoShelter Summit series is to showcase innovative ways to manage the creative process, and Molly’s team is going to show us something we haven’t yet seen before.
“We’ve begun to use Workspaces as a collaboration tool to create mood boards which helps us plan photoshoots with campus partners. It’s been a great tool to make sure we’re all on the same page and to help us as creatives translate our wants to shot lists and plans we can send to our photographers!”
Molly Glynn, Photography Manager at Villanova University
Follow Villanova University on Twitter and Instagram to see some of Molly’s amazing work for the school.
Sarah Bender
If you played sports in high school, do you remember portrait day? It all depends on how the photographer is approaching the set and setting. Sarah’s approach? If you love something enough, (and have a few acquired skills!) the rest will figure itself out.
“The current trend of photographing high school athletes in beautiful studio settings as a tool to promote games and attract recruits is a labor of love,” she said about documenting The Hill School’s Student-Athlete Media Day. “No one is more versed in the power of photographs on social media than the high school athletes themselves.”
In this session, she shares her full workflow—from studio setup to sharing the images with the student-athletes—and the precautions she must take to keep them safe as minors.
Sarah L. Bender was a freelance documentary photographer with Academic Image, a company specializing in creating image libraries for independent boarding schools for 10 years. In early 2021 she accepted the role of lead photographer at The Hill School where she now captures the many facets of life at a premier boarding school. She works within The Office of Strategy Management producing photoshoots and taking photos for use across multiple platforms. Her work is available to the entire campus community, parents, and alumni through an online photo library affectionally known as Hill Snapshots and powered by PhotoShelter.
Own the Moment: 3 Keys for How Teams Can Consistently Create On-Brand Social Content
Native social apps give you the power and tools to feel creative enough to create original content on the fly, but when it comes to creating content that has consistent branding elements attached, there’s no better tool to use than Slate.
For brands trying to create staying power in today’s attention economy, now more than ever both being consistent and knowing how to express your brand visually are qualities that are equally as important. That’s why finding tools that integrate with your multi-step workflow is crucial. Learn more about how they’re helping teams stay on-brand all year round in this Summit session featuring Slate President and Co-founder, Eric Stark.
Read more about how the PhotoShelter for Brands platform integrates with Slate here.
In Plain Sight: Finding the Untold Stories On Campus
You might remember August Miller, Utah Valley University’s Director of Photography from The Innovation Summit presentation he gave last September (2021,) but this year he’s back to share a very detailed behind-the-scenes look at a challenging creative project that grew into a campus-wide campaign.
“This brief BTS video shows the three days of photoshoots we did recently for this years Marketing campaign. The visuals were about “perspective” so I came up with the idea to shoot through a sheet of plexiglass and by placing models on a white platform to get perspective and different angles. The campaign is campus-wide and involved our entire marketing, photography, video and design teams.”
August Miller, Utah Valley University Director of Photography
During this session, August and Utah Valley University’s Graphic Designer, Jenna Heaton will show how they cut out emails altogether and only use their PhotoShelter for Brands account to seamlessly collaborate together on creative projects using Workspaces and more. Plus, they’ll share a sneak peek of their Welcome Back campaign for the 2022 student body.
Click here to watch a 2021 Summit session clip of August Miller explaining the first iteration of this campaign idea—where his team rolled out the ‘Green Carpet’ for students to welcome them back to campus after Covid.
August is a Utah native that began his journey in photography when he was just 14 years old at the urging of his great-grandmother, a nationally respected painter, and artist. She told him he could see light and shadow with amazing detail, so she gave him a camera and the sage advice to try it, and he’s never looked back.His longstanding professional career in photography began when he worked full-time as a photo editor, sports editor, and photographer for a weekly newspaper. After graduation, he spent almost three subsequent decades working as a reporter, photojournalist, photo editor, and Director of Photography & Graphics for newspapers and national magazines. He has also worked as a commercial and advertising photographer for national and regional advertising and marketing agencies. He is currently the Director of Photography at Utah Valley University Marketing & Communication Dept and outside of UVU, he is a sought-after speaker and educator on photographic topics.
Jenna is the Senior Graphic Designer for Utah Valley University Marketing working to create cohesive visuals that enhance the overall university brand, campaign, and events. She has continued her academic practice of graphic design for the past seven years, working as a graphic designer. When she’s not designing she’s usually working on other creative projects like painting, restoring old pianos, or writing songs on the piano.
Stay up to date with the Utah Valley University community by following them on Twitter and Instagram!
How to Build Programs with Purpose: The Ethos Behind Hashtag Sports’ Event Marketing Strategy
Business partnerships these days can’t be driven by the sole need to generate revenue, they have to be backed by purpose.
This year, we’re proud to expand our partnership with Hashtag Sports, an event and content program organization that focuses on driving and creating new opportunities at the intersection between the entertainment, media, and professional sports industries, beyond just in-person event support.
In this Summit session, we gave the floor to Anthony Caponiti, Hashtag Sports’ CEO and Co-Founder to discuss Hashtag Sports’ growth trajectory, the founding story and mission behind the Creators of Color program, and more about how Hashtag Sports plans to continue to create events and programs that bridge gaps and creates opportunities for business collaborations to blossom and talent to be both developed and discovered.
Read more about the Creators of Color program on their website or check out the Hashtag Sports Creators of Color Twitter account for more real-time content from this year’s program.
Want to see what you missed? Watch the entire virtual conference on demand now:
Beyond The PhotoShelter Summit
If you missed our first five virtual conferences in The Summit series, you can watch them all on-demand here.
Bookmark this blog post or follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram to get all the event updates as they get released.
