January brings with it a fresh start for the year and a busy month for Wonderful Machine’s Client Outreach team! Last month, our team — consisting of Suzanne, Gina, Marianne, Julie, Denise, Laura, Bryan, Craig, and Elo — was hard at work updating records and making connections with clients across the globe.
In January 2022, our team added 367 people and 112 companies to our database of publications, agencies, and brands. They updated 921 people and 350 companies. They sent 967 emails to art buyers, integrated producers, communications managers, and photo editors around the world.
Numbers aside, I think everyone on the client outreach team deserves major kudos for constantly improving the quality of contacts in our database (thanks Gina, Marianne, Suzanne, and Julie!), and for the strong connections and client relationships they have been cultivating for our member photographers! Below are a few highlights of our connections and successes last month.
In January, Elo (short for Eloísa) focused on updating and emailing production companies. She reached out to 23 people this month, including a connection with the head of production for Voces Imaginarias, a film and television production company in Mexico City, and a call with London-based video production company Agile Films.
Elo (who is based in Madrid and grew up in Mexico City) is now handling all our Outreach efforts to contacts in the biggest Spanish-speaking countries around the world. In the case of Voces Imaginarias, she had previously worked with them on TV campaigns in Mexico City. The company’s head of production mentioned to her that they frequently work on fashion shoots and they sometimes bring in photographers from New York and elsewhere to work with them.
Her diligent outreach efforts paid off when we were invited to participate in a brief for Agile Films. To discuss the project, she coordinated a call with their content development lead and was joined by Bill and our senior producer Bryan Sheffield who then put together an estimate for an upcoming tech product shoot.
In addition to the call with Agile Films, our Senior Producer Bryan Sheffield led calls with two Canadian agencies. The first was Gardner Productions, an agency focused on telling brand stories. Bryan and Bill had a great call with their executive producer who was pleased to hear about our extensive network of photographers and our production capabilities.
Bryan also had a capabilities call with a producer from Makers, a production agency that is also based in Toronto (one of the agency’s directors was actually a Wonderful Machine photographer earlier in his career!) The team at Makers was familiar with our photographers, but they were excited to learn more about our production capabilities and we provided them with some recommendations of photographers and directors for some of their upcoming projects.
Executive Producer Craig Oppenheimer had calls with Tempe, AZ-based web company GoDaddy, and with Compass, a New York City-based real estate firm with offices in multiple locations across the United States. Both companies have needs for photographers in various markets, and Craig talked them through Wonderful Machine’s capabilities.
Craig was also in touch with clients about two food & beverage and hospitality projects, and one pharmaceutical project this past month. He connected with New York City-based agency Momentum Worldwide to discuss a project for a soda brand and with Chicago-based Arc Worldwide to discuss a still life production for an American food manufacturing company. Craig also worked with Tallahassee, Florida-based Bright Red to bid on a project involving three photographers for four shoots at resorts in Colorado, Switzerland, Brazil, and Turks and Caicos. The pharmaceutical project was for Morrisville, NC-based Syneos Health and he worked on a bid for one of their clients.
Our Manila-based marketing specialist, Denise Florendo, was in touch with the creative director at the experiential agency YAH, and he told her that he had been using our site for over 10 years to find photographers and figured it was finally time to meet! Denise passed along the request to Craig and Bill who took the lead and set up a call with 8 members of their creative and production team. After the call, they were able to set the YAH team with logins to our new site, which enables our favoriting and sharing features.
Last month Denise connected the creative director of San Francisco-based ATHR Beauty with our photo editor Andrew Souders who provided research on fashion and beauty photographers near Tucson, AZ. She also corresponded with the photo editor from Hawaiian Airlines’ inflight magazine Hana Hou! who said, “love what you all are doing. I’ll be in touch and see if we could collaborate on a project.”
Need help researching clients? Email our project managers.
Have feedback about the clients we’re promoting to? Email Bill.