Why it matters:
- Artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionized content creation for businesses across industries, producing everything from social media posts to marketing campaigns in minutes and even seconds, versus hours, days, or weeks.
- In turn, AI-driven tech platforms that promise to boost businesses’ efficiency, speed to market, and sales have proliferated.
- Against that backdrop, Getty Images is banking on its ever-growing library of 615 million exclusive visual assets, plus content creators and a suite of AI tools, to differentiate from the competition with tech solutions designed to help small and medium-sized businesses succeed in the visual economy today.
The AI revolution has upended content creation for businesses large and small, uncorking a flood of tech tools designed to spit out hyper-personalized text and imagery for everything from social media campaigns to online product descriptions at scale and in seconds, with the promise of supercharging productivity, marketing, and sales.
But amid the frenzy of new AI-powered B2B solutions, Getty Images is betting on the vast library of proprietary and commercially safe photos and stock images it’s been amassing for three decades—combined with a suite of AI tools—to grant SMBs “the visual ingredients” they need to drive business today, Grant Farhall, Chief Product Officer, told CO—.
Feeding the visual content beast has become a massive undertaking for businesses as social media platforms from TikTok to Instagram and digital marketing channels proliferate.
“The demand for imagery has gone way up,” Farhall said. And how that imagery is used has radically changed. “Where in the past [B2B] customers were selecting that one image that was going to be in a magazine for 30 days, now they’re selecting images that are going to be the image on their social media feed for 30 minutes,” he said.
An AI-powered visual strategy is increasingly becoming a non-negotiable to help them compete. “AI raises the stakes in marketing, [widening the gap] between leaders and laggards in the race to harness its potential,” according to a Bain & Company analysis of 1,200 senior marketing executives.
Feeding the visual content beast: ‘They’re wrestling with, how do they do that at scale?’
Getty, which boasts an ever-growing library of more than 615 million visual assets (images, videos, and illustrations), might be best known as that ubiquitous provider of photos spanning news, entertainment, and culture to media outlets. It’s also the keeper of iconic archival shots like Alfred Eisenstaedt’s V-J Day in Times Square in 1945.
But it also counts big brands such as Dove, Chipotle, and Toyota among its B2B clients, as well as solopreneurs and SMBs—a fast-growing part of the business, Farhall said.
“A lot of the companies that are experiencing growth or trying to drive growth, some of the challenges they’re wrestling with is, how do they generate [creative assets] at scale?” he said. “They know they have to target their audience in different ways, but often in the SMB space, they don’t necessarily have full-time design teams. They may not have the skills themselves to use some of the more complicated tools. They may struggle to even come up with the core idea and concept,” he said.
While Getty has long been a “starting point for what we call ‘the blank page problem,’ now AI can help solve that in a different way.”
Getty leans into differentiation in a competitive field: ‘It’s the number one reason why businesses are hesitant to use AI’
Getty’s big AI investment comes as the technology has sparked heightened competition in the visual content space.
In addition to free AI platforms, “Adobe and AI tools like Midjourney are disrupting traditional stock photo models with cheaper, customized image generation, despite current limitations in the category,” according to an eMarketer report.
Farhall stressed that Getty’s AI solutions, which range from $14.99 to $149 per month, solve a major pain point for entrepreneurs and SMBs that other platforms can’t by creating commercially safe visual content that will protect them against legal risks and compromising their brand integrity.
“When we talk to our customers, the number one reason why they are hesitant to use AI for image generation is because they have concerns about legal risks and the ethics of this all,” Farhall said. “So that’s what we’ve tried to solve for by having a truly clean, commercially safe model.”
Getty has been in the content creation game for 30 years, and its AI tools are now linked to hundreds of millions of licensed creative images. When it comes to other AI providers, “everything has to be created from scratch, or it has to come from somewhere else,” such as AI models built from scraping the web, Farhall said.
By contrast, businesses start with a creative image they license from Getty and “then can modify it in a safe way.”
The company’s AI image generator is trained exclusively on its own licensed creative library. And Getty provides users legal protection for images licensed through its AI tools, should potential legal or financial liability from copyright issues arise—which is practically unheard of from other AI platforms, said Michael Pachter, Managing Director, Strategic Planning for Wedbush Securities, an analyst who covers Getty. Because Getty is training AI with its own data, “you never have to worry about copyright infringement,” he said. “AI is sorting all the copyrighted material.”
[Read more: Salesforce, Intuit, and ADP Execs on AI-Powered Solutions Designed to Fuel SMB Growth in 2025]
The demand for imagery has gone way up. Where in the past [B2B] customers were selecting that one image that was going to be in a magazine for 30 days, now they’re selecting images that are going to be the image on their social media feed for 30 minutes.Grant Farhall, Chief Product Officer at Getty Images
Tapping into businesses’ surge in demand for personalized visual content via AI: ‘That’s where we see a lot of the activity’
Increasingly, AI is enabling brands to scale personalized visual content and drive higher ROI across marketing channels, according to a Deloitte report.
But “no one is going to win the day by having the most features or the best features, because everybody is going to have the same features,” Farhall said.
Instead, success will come down to how safely, simply, and quickly AI platforms can help businesses churn out visual content that’s super customized, he said.
Indeed, 75% of consumers are more likely to buy from brands that serve up personalized content, which increasingly includes images and videos, according to McKinsey.
Getty is looking to tap into that heightened demand, serving B2B clients via its namesake platform geared mostly towards enterprise clients; e-commerce stock content division iStock; and Unsplash, the latter two largely serving SMBs and entrepreneurs.
Getty’s visual marketplace also includes exclusive content from a staff of 115 editorial photographers and videographers and more than 81,000 exclusive creative contributors. SMBs can customize that creative content with its AI-powered text-to-image generator. Businesses then hold the sole license to the assets so that the image will never appear on a competitor’s website or marketing campaign, Getty promises.
Farhall says the depth, breadth, and scope of its creative library allows businesses to personalize content faster. “Customers can get closer to the vision that’s in their head,” he said. “It’s the pairing of our pre-shot images with AI capabilities so that customers can actually source a visual that is more precisely what they’re looking for,” he said. “And that’s where we see a lot of the activity in terms of [businesses’] use of our AI suite, particularly on iStock.”
In recent years, AI tools that produce imagery and text have saved businesses on costly product shoots for marketing campaigns, for one. That’s why Getty’s simple “remove the background” generative AI feature has become one of its most popular tools for businesses.
So for a retailer’s e-commerce site, for example, “If you have an image—an apple, a person, a dog—and just want that to be isolated on a white background, in one click of a button, you can remove the background,” Farhall said. The remove feature is one of a suite of AI modification tools such as “replace an object” and “add a new element,” whereby users write a text prompt to describe the visual content they envision.
“Our model tends to produce images that look more like production images because, again, the data source is our creative stock libraries,” Farhall said.
“It’s about being able to rapidly create different versions of an image to use in different channels, different markets, different audiences.”
As the company competes in an ever-more-crowded AI market, Wedbush Securities’ Pachter predicts that businesses will continue to pay for Getty’s vast custom-content possibilities enabled by AI.
“Here’s an analogy: Pandora is free and Spotify costs money. So why does everybody use Spotify? Because Spotify has 100 million songs and Pandora has about 900,000,” he estimated. “And because we want to pick the songs we want when we want them.”
[Read more: 3 Consumer Brand Founders and CEOs on Finding Growth in B2B Channels]
Optimizing marketing campaigns via AI
Businesses that leverage generative AI to scale functions such as campaign optimization ranked among the highest performing marketers, the Bain report found.
Farhall pointed to a Sony Pictures movie promotion as one such success story.
On a mission to whip up buzz and fan engagement for Venom: The Last Dance, Sony tapped Getty (and creative agency Trigger XR) to execute its Venomize My Pet campaign. The studio wanted to pull off the tricky task of enabling fans to transform their pet into a Venom Symbiote–infused creature from the film, while maintaining the creature’s IP integrity. Leveraging Getty’s AI tech, users uploaded a pet photo to generate a “Venomized” version of their pet, sharing the images on social media.
The campaign outperformed Sony’s expectations, according to its Shorty Awards’ entry. “The venomization tool’s success was driven by its high replay value, as fans eagerly venomized multiple animals, further amplifying its organic reach,” the studio said.
Next up: Better prompting
Looking ahead, Farhall points to Getty’s upcoming AI prompting tools as a key growth opportunity.
“Coming up with the right words to describe what you want the AI model to create for you is still very hard and requires skill,” he said.
“We’ve invested a lot in machine learning and AI to improve our search [function] so that customers can use richer, more descriptive search queries and find pre-shot images,” Farhall said. “This way they can pursue the good ideas faster and throw out the bad ideas faster—even if they don’t want to use an AI image in their end production,” he said. “I think making that part of the process easier is really exciting.”
CO— aims to bring you inspiration from leading respected experts. However, before making any business decision, you should consult a professional who can advise you based on your individual situation.
CO—is committed to helping you start, run and grow your small business. Learn more about the benefits of small business membership in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, here.
Interested in a small business membership?
Find out how the U.S. Chamber of Commerce can help your company grow and thrive in today's rapidly-evolving business environment. Connect with our team to learn how a small business membership can benefit your bottom line and help you achieve your goals.
