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In December, our team engaged with clients in a variety of ways. The Client Outreach department, consisting of Molly Germer, Ian Crammer, Laura Wontor, Gina Martin, Denise Florendo, Lana Jergović, Bryan Sheffield, and Andrew Souders, produced some noteworthy updates.
We added 129 companies and 387 people to our database last month. Additionally, we updated 1536 companies, 1640 people, and sent out over 325 emails to producers, art directors, creative directors, marketing managers, and photo editors. Below are some examples of the projects our team has been diligently working on.
Molly’s role has changed this month from updating records for ad agencies to updating records for brands. In updating brands, Molly is specifically focusing on making sure we have an up-to-date employee count, which ensures that we have an approximate idea of the general size of each company. She has been finding that, after having bounced from focusing on publications, agencies, and brands respectively, she is gaining a better understanding of what a good prospect for Wonderful Machine’s member photographers looks like.
Ian is settling into his new role of updating our records for the people who work for the publications we track. He is currently focusing on the records for people that do not contain a working email. Ian has found that it can at times be challenging to find a working email for a person, especially for those that do not keep their LinkedIn profile up to date. In those cases, we’re never sure if an email is not working because the person is no longer working at the company or if the company’s email format has simply changed.
Laura is continuing her role of promoting our member photographers with the oldest promoted date. Since many people throughout Wonderful Machine’s team go through our database and recommend our member photographers, inevitably some of our photographers get promoted more frequently than others, due to factors like their locale and the popularity of their specialties. Laura works through our list of member photographers by “oldest promoted date” and finds appropriate clients for promotion. Laura is always sure to forward messages along to our member photographers when she receives a response from a client that they’ve heard of the photographer she’s promoting or recognizes their work. She noted that, “It not only boosts their morale, but also shows that our hard work is paying off (maybe not immediately but in the long-run).”
Gina has been sorting through all the Out-of-Office replies that we receive. Wonderful Machine tracks these “OOO” emails because they often contain important information — from mobile phone numbers, company updates, and colleague contacts — that we did not have previously. Gina understands how important it is to have accurate contact information for our clients and companies, and says, “We work a lot with photographers and marketing lists and need to make sure our contact information is up to date and accurate.”
For Denise, the last month of 2022 consisted of updating records of companies in the following specific Linkedin industries: Financial Services, Food & Beverage, Furniture and Home Furnishings, Government Administration, and Education Administration Programs. Denise also added quite a few companies from the “Wellness and Fitness Services” industry, including some big names like: Anytime Fitness, AdvoCare, Planet Fitness, Groupe Clarins, Orangetheory Fitness, and doTERRA International.
Lana began this month in a role focused on updating our client records in general, starting from our website (when we usually use our database as a starting point). Because we make our data updates to items in our database and to the corresponding profile on our website, discrepancies between the two often happen. Additionally, when deleting a company from our database, it’s easy to forget to also delete that company from our site. During the month, Lana then switched to focusing on updating records for all of our companies that are publications. This role includes ensuring that we have viable people connections at each of those publications.
This month, Bryan had a call with the art buying and creative team at a large interactive & experiential agency. This was a “get to know each other” call, as Bryan and our other producers had previously bid on a photography production for a large American multinational retail corporation with them. Bryan and our producers have since been awarded the job, to take place next week. After they presented a few options, the agency and client have chosen to work with Wonderful Machine and our member photographer, Amie Santavicca, a very talented lifestyle photographer based in Tampa, FL. Bryan et al. are looking forward to working with Amie on location next week!
Bryan also had a call with the Senior Client Manager at a large full service agency with multiple locations nationally. They were interested in learning more about our production services, our roster of photographers, and our ability to source and work with photographers all over the globe.
Finally, Bryan along with two of his Wonderful Machine producer colleagues had a call with the Global Design Director at a large well-known American multinational consumer goods corporation.
The company was very much interested in our photographer directory, and the conversation grew to how Wonderful Machine can help to solve their current imagery problems. They are in the midst of initial conversations about working together on a few upcoming projects!
Some other current projects Bryan and his colleagues are bidding on with clients include a photo production for an automotive client, a photo project for an entertainment/media brand, a 2-day headshot shoot for a pharmaceutical client, a multi-day production for a workwear brand, and a multi-photographer production for a health & beauty brand.
Andrew has continued to research and email clients to share Wonderful Machine’s services and production capabilities. He’s also recently begun a process to research, add, and update client companies who are part of the Fortune 500 and the Fortune 1000. A recent successful project with AmerisourceBergen has inspired Andrew and our team of producers to focus their energies more on similar large Fortune companies – making sure we have all of them in our database, along with all of the best people at these companies so that we can connect, share our capabilities, and promote photographers to these companies. Ideally, we’d like to be able to curate a list of all of the current Fortune companies and the best contacts there for Wonderful Machine’s own outreach, along with the ability to share this as a listbuild with photographers.
Last month, Craig and our team of producers worked with one of our Fortune 100 clients (and one of our member photographers) to photograph their executive leadership team. He had a creative call with a large New York City healthcare agency to discuss some of their projects requiring photographers and production in various cities around the world. Additionally, Craig worked with a Raleigh-based PR/Communications firm to bid on a project that involves documenting a large trade show and he also bid on a campaign for Kohler, via a Toronto-based production company.
Have questions about how we promote our photographers? Check out our Membership page. Want to know how you can get the most out of your Wonderful Machine membership? Check out our Jumpstart page or just reach out!