Text: Gary Parkinson, enterprise content manager, Shutterstock 

Technology has become an essential tool for structured and scalable marketing programs. As marketers, we use technology to:

• Build our campaigns
• Measure our performance
• Document our learnings
• Make improvements for future programs

Technology can even help optimize how we produce content. Let’s be honest, content is the vital piece to any successful campaign. That being said, we need agile ways to produce more content faster and easier.

Shutterstock is a platform designed to make creativity simple for your team. Shutterstock removes some of the creative burden from your brand’s in-house creative teams so you can devote more internal resources toward strategy and execution.

AI and machine learning technology are core components of Shutterstock’s platform. These capabilities, along with dedicated professional services, allow your team to continuously iterate on creative processes with more scalable solutions.

Showcasing machine learning

Shutterstock features a number of its AI innovations on its experimentation site, Shutterstock Showcase. Showcase includes AI-powered tools to enhance and improve the image search experience for consumers.

Shutterstock Showcase includes AI-powered tools to enhance and improve the image search experience for consumers

There are four dynamic capabilities available through Showcase that use machine learning technology to streamline content creation for your team.

1. Refine

Refine is an astute piece of technology that narrows down image search results. When searching for a particular piece of content, your parameters will likely surface a wide variety of options.

The benefit of Refine is that you determine what those results will feature. Select your favourite image(s) from the first page of results and Refine will automatically filter to collections of images with a similar look and feel to your selection. This is a great way to streamline the search process and save valuable time as you search through a collection of 280 million images for the perfect piece of content.

2. Reveal

Ensuring you have content that’s fully licensed is an often overlooked part of content creation, but it’s a vitally important part of the process in order to protect your team from indemnification. Shutterstock Reveal simplifies the licensing process with help from our useful Google Chrome plug-in.

Suppose you’re doing a quick image search on Google and you come across a beautiful piece of content. However, you can’t just simply download the asset and upload it to your own marketing programs. The person, or the company, who posted that image downloaded it from a platform like Shutterstock, but the licensing rights only extend to that initial downloader.

In order to acquire a licensed image of your own, use the Google Chrome plug-in to automatically surface a royalty-free equivalent of that content. One click is all it takes, and that content can be yours.

3. Composition Search

Let’s say you have an idea for the perfect piece of content. You can envision the layout in your mind, the product, people or landmark placement within the content, and where you would want to position copy on the visual. All you need to do now is to find that perfect asset.

That’s where our Composition Search comes into play. Composition Search is built upon our next generation visual similarity model, enabling you to place keywords on a canvas and move them around to align with where you want the subject matter to appear in the image. The technology will find strong matches based not only on your search terms, but also on the placement of your search terms.

This is a very powerful tool that will undoubtedly streamline your creative workflow. Streamlined workflows mean time and resources saved for your own team that can be redirected towards other business priorities.

4. Copy Space

Finally, our Copy Space tool leverages computer vision technology to make more precise searches for content. Specifically, it filters search results towards images with white space that can be filled in with ad copy.

You can even use the layout filter to click and drag where you want the white space to appear on the content. This filter applies machine learning to surface results that perfectly align with where you want white space for ad copy. Simple and easy workflow!

The power of API

The Shutterstock API program allows companies to use Shutterstock's platform capabilities such as AI-powered search, licensing, and image editing directly in their creative workflows. The Shutterstock API helps teams reduce disproportionate amounts of time searching for content. The end result is:

• Accelerated workflows
• More creative content
• Increase of campaigns

Shutterstock’s API has been adopted by some of the world’s largest brands, including Google, Snapchat, and IBM. Why do brands love Shutterstock’s API? Simply put, it’s defining industry standards for multi-media content discovery. Discovering fresh content for new creative ideas has never been easier, and Shutterstock is proud to be at the forefront of this growing trend.

AI at Shutterstock saves you valuable time

In the end, Shutterstock’s various AI and machine learning capabilities will streamline your entire creative workflow. Our features are built to save teams of all sizes, from small startup companies to the largest global corporations, invaluable time on creativity.

Time is a resource in very limited capacity. Any good marketing campaign requires an abundance of time to plan, implement, measure, and report on. If there’s any way to reduce the time you need to invest in one part of that process so you can better manage the others, that’s an investment you can’t afford to pass up.

AI and machine learning technology makes this all possible, and Shutterstock’s suite of capabilities—combined with collections of premium visual and video content—help empower creativity for you and your team. Simplified creativity means faster execution, which translates into more ad campaigns, higher growth potential, and new business opportunities.