The picturesque journey of Getty Images

Nitin Lakhotia, Country Manager, India and South Asia, speaks about what makes Getty better and more.

Q1. Individuals, media houses, and advertisers rely heavily on stock images for their daily content requirements. How Getty caters to this vivid audience?

Getty Images is the gold-standard source for the creative needs of any marketer, advertiser, or publisher. We can support any project, whether you are launching a worldwide campaign, publishing to an audience of millions, simply building your first website or sharing your favorite images via social.

We serve nearly 1 million customers in nearly every country in the world, with websites in 14 languages. The premium creative content at Getty Images and our value offering, iStock by Getty Images, is driven by industry-leading creative research and visual anthropology and hand-curated by a global team who elevate the best imagery to help customers find the right image faster. Our innovative search functionality identifies the right mix of recency and relevancy, enabling us to quickly present the right content to the right customer.

Q2. Marketers and advertisers have always been on a tight budget for their projects. How do your flexible plans come in as a boon?

Our value offering, iStock by Getty Images, is one of the world's leading stock content marketplaces, offering millions of hand-picked premium images at ridiculously low prices that you can only get from us.

With over 45 million assets, iStock by Getty Images is the original resource for premium, royalty-free stock imagery, video and audio sourced from the crowd, with a network of almost 150,000 contributors worldwide.

Q3. Marketers and advertisers are going in for VR. Getty has also ventured into this newest medium of storytelling. What's the future you're seeing...

People crave immersive experiences because immersion is emotive, it elicits emotion and it’s this that offers the real opportunity for brands as it‘s through emotion and imagination that you engage audiences.

Customer demand for first-person point of view (POV) content has increased by 20% YOY. Their popularity is because they provide a raw, immersive and authentic feel leading to greater levels of engagement.

But VR allows you to be in the place rather than a passive observer of a 2D window we're moving from seeing something to experiencing something.... Searches for Virtual reality grew 320% YOY. VR is a 360-degree immersive experience. When viewed in a headset it can be highly emotive with the user feeling as if they are mentally and physically in the environment and situation.

Ultimately, it’s all about connection - advertisers/sponsors are going to be able to connect users/customers: with similar interests, to products, and to experiences.

Q4. and what are your plans regarding VR.

In 2017 the technology is finally delivering on its promise while content creators are only just beginning to understand what makes a compelling experience. This year Getty Images is using immersive content to enhance our ability, and therefore our clients’ ability, to tell stories in a new way, to offer a new immersive experience.

Getty Images has over 25,000 360 assets on www.gettyimages.com and growing by more than 1,000 assets per month. Our collection offers stock of key locations, destinations and landmarks around the globe and unique vantage points on many of the biggest news, sports, and entertainment events on the planet.

Q5. Filters are the rage on social. And social is where the brands are. As a stock image provider, how do you see this scenario? Is there an opportunity lying somewhere...

We are inundated with thousands of images every day. With the proliferation of social media and camera phones in virtually every pocket, we have become accustomed to seeing a wide variety of aesthetics in the visual landscape.

People are highly critical of and vocal about advertising and imagery in a way they haven’t been before. Social media has had a huge impact on the type of imagery that resonates. Put simply, people want to see authentic, real-life imagery. People are fed up with perfection.

At Getty Images, we recognize the influence of imagery on society and appreciate our role in challenging accepted norms by painting an authentic picture of the world. That’s why we announced recently that Getty Images will no longer accept creative images depicting models whose body shapes have been retouched to make them look thinner or larger.

Spurred by a new law in France that requires clients who use commercial images in the region to disclose whether the body shape of the model has been retouched, Getty Images has amended its Creative Stills Submission Requirements globally to ensure that such retouched creative materials cannot be submitted.

We’re the first in our industry to do this and hope that others will follow suit so that together we can tackle stereotypes, create tolerance and ultimately empower communities to feel represented. We would struggle to do this without cooperation from the media, who we believe also have a responsibility to choose content that is representative of its readers.

Q6. Hollywood has been embracing the stock videos since long. Back home also it is catching up. What makes Getty Images' stock videos a strong option?

Quite simply, because we have the best video in the industry. Getty Images video collection contains approximately 6 million clips and growing, including content from leading editorial video producers such as VICE Media, Discovery, GoPro, BBC, and AFP. The collection contains over 650,000 4K videos.

Q7. What sets Getty Images apart from other stock images providers?

Getty Images offers the highest quality and most diverse content, based on industry-leading expertise and innovation, with pricing to support any size project or budget. Getty Images has never been a company that stands still. By embracing disruption and change, Getty Images has rapidly evolved from an analogue stock photography business to the global visual content industry leader by each and every measure. We have the industry’s largest and most experienced creative research team with award-winning art directors who understand how imagery drives brands and businesses.

And then, quite frankly, we have the best photographers. Our photographers have won more than 1,000 major industry awards including the Pulitzer Prize, World Press Photo, Picture of the Year International, Sony World Photography Awards, White House Photographer of the Year, Visa d'Or, Ville de Perpignan Remi Ochlik, UK Picture Guild Awards Press Photographer of the Year, Sports Photographer of the Year and Creative Review Photography Annual. Our images move the world.

Q8. For Nitin Lakhotia, what is Getty Images? And what inspires him to be associated with it?

We move the world with Images. It is the Emotional and Creative depth and Commercial excellence of Getty Images that inspires me to be associated with them.