Jessica Carroll, Major League Baseball’s Sr. Director of Photography, recently spoke with our very own CEO, Andrew Fingerman, at the annual Hashtag Sports Conference. We’ve been working with MLB for nearly 15 years (they were one of our first customers!), and they have been a driving force in many of our product development and innovation initiatives over the years as a true partner.
When asked how and why MLB places PhotoShelter for Brands at the heart of their organization’s collaborative workflow, her answer couldn’t have explained the benefit of using a DAM to streamline creative operations any better. Her extended insight captures their workflow perfectly:
“We have this urgency, but it’s not enough to get a mediocre placeholder out there right away. Our goal is to get a finished product out there that can serve that real-time need as well as that archival need.
So, we have put a system in place that is working on getting the highest quality photos from the camera with metadata into PhotoShelter, cropped and toned as needed. If you start with a good photo, hopefully, it doesn’t need as much. Then it can get pushed out to all of the end-users. Once it’s in PhotoShelter, that’s kind of our final product. We’re not looking to go back and do a lot; we don’t like to do these workflows multiple times.
Once it goes into PhotoShelter, then we have the integration with Greenfly (for real-time social sharing), where we push photos through to our player social program. We also work with our licensing partner, Getty Images, to push photos out to our licensing and sponsorship partners, our broadcast partners like Fox, ESPN. They use our photos for tune-in. Nike uses photos, as you see in a lot of city connectors, their recent promotions. We’ve worked with team photographers to produce that content. So, our stakeholders span a lot of external partners as well as internal.
We’re a service department, as I mentioned at the beginning, to all our internal departments. So, we have stakeholders from our PR department to our marketing department to our editorial. We work on a lot of the forward-facing photos on MLB.com and the club pages, to more long-term projects like our publications and our photo archive, to make sure that it’s preserved for perpetuity.”
Jess’ description of how MLB utilizes PhotoShelter’s capabilities not only makes sense for a sports use-case, it’s proof that any business can employ the same kind of workflow. Her answer to this fairly straightforward question exemplifies the world of possibilities our product provides to leagues, teams, colleges, universities, and B2C or B2B brands – from startups to global giants. The answer spoke perfectly to what we work towards internally to ensure PhotoShelter is driving the highest return on creative investments brands make in their content – so its actionable in the moment and archived for the future.
