UpperCut Starts Promotional Blitz . . .
Stock Asylum Staff Report
September 7, 2005
Uppercut's web site is officially live and you can expect to hear a
lot about it during the coming months, according to owner Miles Gerstein.
"We're very excited about the launch," said Gerstein, describing a promotional blitz that should reach nearly every buyer of stock photography in the United States.
"We feel we have excellent photographers and excellent photography," he added. "We have about 13,000 new pictures, pretty much all new production."
Gerstein said UpperCut will introduce itself to buyers through trade publications, mailers, catalogs and personal visits from members of its U.S. staff of 47.
He noted that the first national ad has just appeared and said additional ads will be in Communication Arts, Creativity and Print magazines over the next six to eight issues of each publication.
In addition, he said, the company will send some 43,000 mailers and a series of catalogs, including a general piece this month with 64 full-page pictures.
Several "photographer catalogs" will follow, each highlighting the work of two UpperCut shooters. The first photographer catalog goes out in October, featuring images by Sean Kennedy Santos and David Maisel.
The UpperCut web site actually appeared at the end of July as a "soft-launch," meaning it went up with little fanfare while the company's technical staff worked out the kinks.
With about a year of photography production preceding the launch, the library represents the first really new collection of general rights-managed stock photography to hit the market in several years.
"The hardest thing was to keep the quality up," said Gerstein, praising industry veteran Ellen Boughn, who spearheads the UpperCut effort. He added that there should be about 20,000 images online by the end of the year.
Gerstein, who is known for starting successful royalty-free brands like PunchStock and Artville, said he decided to try a traditional brand this time because "I thought it would be very difficult to differentiate another royalty-free brand."
"When I looked at the market, there was a lot of interesting photography around that wasn't represented properly."
He said it would have been difficult to start the new brand without the existing PunchStock staff in place.
"You can't do a project like this if you are not already in the business," he said. "It's very expensive."
"We have about 30,000 customers that already buy from us so the whole infrastructure in place," he asserted.
Gerstein said his decision to offer photography "where art and commerce meet" has proven a good one. Since this decision was made, Photonica has been purchased by Getty Images and Zefa by Corbis. The two acquisitions left few independent distributors in the niche, Gerstein noted.
As a result, other companies have shown considerable interest in subdistributing the UpperCut collection. Gerstein said he will work on subdistribution agreements during an upcoming two-week tour of Europe.
UpperCut offers a minimal amount of rights protection with each image it licenses. The company guarantees it will not license the same image for competing uses in the same industry, in the same geographic location, in the same medium, during the same time frame. As with most rights-managed stock licenses, buyers can pay for additional exclusivity.
The UpperCut web site also includes PunchStock's collection of some 700,000 royalty-free images.
UpperCut Images can be found at: http://www.uppercutimages.com
PunchStock
is at: http://www.punchstock.com
