This week,
Website Planet had the opportunity to interview Claudio Ricci, Co-Founder and CEO of Picter, the world’s first visual project management tool, and platform of choice for over 190.000 talented creatives worldwide and hundreds of top firms, including Vice, Vogue and more.
We looked at the original idea and story behind one of their products, Picter Contest, its functionalities, and got some insights into the future of the industry.
Please, Introduce Picter To Our Audience. What Products And Services Do You Offer?
Picter is a software platform where image makers and brands meet. With
Picter Contest we have created a software platform where creators from all over the world find some of the best opportunities to submit their works without creating multiple accounts and sending their files repeatedly.
On the other side of the table, we help small to large-sized brands and organizations to manage thousands of submissions – collaboratively, visually and in the most effective way. We also provide a tool for creative review called Picter Workspace.
What’s Your Mission?
Provide opportunities for emerging creative professionals and help brands and organizations access the world’s top creative talent.
What Sparked The Idea For Picter Contest, And How Has It Evolved So Far?
The founders of Picter (Simon Lovermann, Claudio Ricci, Leon Kirchlechner and Matthias Lohscheidt) are also the founders of the internationally renowned Organization for Contemporary Photography Der Greif.
Der Greif – now in its 15th year of existence – has published thousands of photographers both online and in print and helped them start their careers. All of Der Greif’s projects are submission based. On average, for every opportunity Der Greif provides, Der Greif receives thousands of images from artists from all around the globe. To handle these vast amounts of data, Der Greif has built internal software, which worked perfectly. After finding out that other players on the market had the same problem, Picter was founded and an even better software was developed with the platform effect, creating a space where people could meet, get inspired, get discovered and at the same time efficiently handle large amounts of image files.
What Problems Affect Your Customers When They Come To You, And What Makes Them Choose Picter Contest Over The Competition?
Picter Contest is not only highly efficient, but it also matches the high standards of design and aesthetics that people are used to in the creative industries and art world. At Picter, our customers find both. When coming to us, our customers usually have clunky self-made processes or even self-made software, which is usually highly inefficient or very expensive to maintain. Managing high volumes of data and image files requires exquisite UI and UX and data processing power. Since the founders of Picer are all native in the creative industry and art world, its product has become a state of the art since they all understand the problems their customers face best. Most of the competitors are not specialized in this industry but rather offer broad and generic solutions which makes it very hard to work with.
Another critical point is that many of our customers need specific advice on managing their processes, and we can get back to our 15 years of experience to help them out. But not only advisory is important: By now we have a community of over 200k registered creators, so using Picter already gives our customers a massive advantage by stepping into a pre-existing and highly focused, engaged and targeted community.
Picter is used by hundreds of organizations and brands and therefore has become a point of reference for the global creative community. This gives Picter a massive advantage over software and tech-focused competitors. The community and platform effect is paying out a lot and getting more crucial from month to month.
Can You Share Any Recent Success Stories That Show How Your Clients Leverage Picter For Their Business?
We have plenty of success stories for our artists that submit to the contests hosted on our platform as each of our contests determines one or several winners every time! For our contest hosts, we find the most joy when someone launches a new contest for the first time. We love to guide and provide them with our expertise to help them launch the best possible contest.
Recently a major camera manufacturing brand launched their first-ever contest to receive directly licensable content for their social media and marketing campaigns. The creators were super happy to have been selected and about this amazing visibility, reputation and remuneration, and likewise, the brand received more than 5k submissions of outstanding content from our community. A win-win for both parties!
What Other Tools Can You Suggest To Plan And Promote A Contest?
In order to run successful contests, most of our clients use a variety of tools. The most important one is a mailing service such as Mailchimp (we also offer an integration for that) to communicate well with their entrants. Communication with entrants is key for a successful project, so having a good tool set up is essential.
In case our clients want to store the images separately, most of them rely on Google Drive or Dropbox for file storage. I have to admit that they are not the best solutions for digital asset management. However, they are still widely used.
How Do You See The Future Of Your Industry?
The imaging industry has been undergoing significant changes for years. Visual content is ubiquitous; every brand is now a media company with an ever-increasing need for visual assets.
As generative AI becomes more prevalent, the lower end of the stock photography market will likely disappear. However, we see this as an opportunity for the high-quality image makers on Picter. More and more brands are looking indistinguishable, so bespoke, unique visual content will be in high demand.
The creators and image makers on Picter are shaping the future of visual culture. Therefore, we will continue supporting our industry by providing better, creator-friendly opportunities and enabling both sides to focus on content rather than logistics. There is a big opportunity here, and we are willing and ready to seize it and get our share of the market!
