In this new millennium, two societal trends growing at an exponential rate that stand at the forefront of our changing culture include an increasingly diverse population and a digitally inclined society. As a result, a new wave of digital marketers are attempting to find new, creative ways to more effectively represent their clients in the context of this new world.
Nicole Carter, an Atlanta-based entrepreneur, is driven to share her creative vision for the world with her digital marketing agency, Creative Flame Media, and sister company, Diversity Photos. Carter began her career with the Gwinnett Chamber of Commerce as an economic developer, recruiting tech and entertainment companies. Realizing her passion for marketing, she began working for a post-production house she had originally recruited to the area as a marketer. After being laid off as a result of the company going under, Carter came to an important crossroads in her career: to return to the corporate world or continue with marketing?
After conversing with her husband, Carter ultimately decided to “strike out on her own,” as she called it and test the shaky marketing terrain. She started out as a freelance marketer taking various projects from small businesses. As projects and clients grew over time, Carter began to take on subcontractors to assist her with the demanding workload. Before long, her business was taking on projects for hometown favorites like Delta, Georgia Power and the Decatur Book Festival. These and other larger companies like Dell and Google remain clients of Creative Flame Media to this day.
Creative Flame Media offers a wide range of marketing services including copywriting, project management, graphic design and experiential marketing. Carter humorously notes that, “we’ve got a good number of type-A people, which is interesting for a creative company, so we meet our deadlines.”
While marketing for these organizations, Carter realized the new digital landscape, in particular social media platforms, was affecting marketing strategies. No longer were the days of blasting one large ad to the entire population through a television commercial. With the advent of social media it is much more efficient to direct targeted ads towards specific customer groups. Targeted ads offer the ability to speak to each customer in very different and unique ways. Carter found herself unable to capture the proper visual aspect for her ads, especially when targeted towards minorities or other diverse populations.
“I had the words, but when I was looking for the visual, especially for diverse groups, whether it was ethnicity, religion or size, I was having a really hard time finding the images I needed,” Carter said. “In a world where photos and videos reign supreme, we can’t afford to get our visuals wrong.”
Precious time was wasted scouring online sources to find proper visuals, often without success. Without missing a beat, Carter addressed this problem by starting a separate company to address the obvious need and opportunity in the market, and with this Diversity Photos was launched.
Diversity Photos, a diverse stock photo website, effectively solves the problem Carter faced as a marketer. Now, clients can use the wide ranging photo library to target a specified audience. Carter identified “professional black women with natural hair” as an example of stock photos that were not identified in traditional search engines.
“I knew what my target audience looked like, I knew there was nuance that I needed in order for these ads to be authentic and resonate with people, and I couldn’t find it, that is not a problem now,” Carter said.
An increasingly diverse culture, workforce, and professional world requires a more nuanced understanding of marketing and branding as a whole. As Carter noted, “For a brand, accurately representing any segment of a population is crucial in today’s world of sophisticated buyers.”
In an attempt to grow its brand, Diversity Photos has partnered with Adobe Stock. Adobe Stock service provides businesses and designers access to millions of photos templates, and vectors through any number of its creative desktop apps like Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. Adobe has provided a crucial platform for Diversity Photos to add to its diverse portfolio. The partnership with Adobe Stock has gone so well Diversity Photos has plans underway to hire more contributors this summer to shoot for the Adobe collection.
In addition, many of the contributors Diversity Photos already has onboard are diverse and represent behind the camera what they are capturing on camera.
“I think it’s really important in terms of getting authenticity because they understand the community that they are going out and shooting,” Carter said.
