This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Mazer and Jason Kelly on Bloomberg Radio. All right, so as we start the final hour of this Monday edition, let's check in with Stan Pavlovsky. He is the CEO, newly minted of shutter Stock. He joins us on the phone just up the road from me in Westchester. So stand first of all, congratulations on your new job. Nothing like taking over as the boss during a pandemic. So remind us kind of give us a stay to play for for shutter Stock
right now. Absolutely, so thanks for having me. Very excited to talk to you. UM. Shover Stock is a technology company, a two sided marketplace where we have two million customers of all sizes, whether it's a small or medium business or a large enterprise or agency that comes to us to get their stories told. We have the freshest, most diverse content um and services, and we have over million contributors worldwide that make our content library best in class.
Talk to me a little bit and we'll delve deeper deeper into the business. But I'm just curious. You know, you took over in April as president and CEO and CEO. You were you were previously already the CEO. But did you have like a dream that then you had to adapt or put on hold because of the pandemic. Like, what is that like as someone in the C suite that has to pivot really quickly to sort of stay alive. Yeah, it's a great it's a great point. So interestingly, I
started on April one, so as the CEO. So it was very uh, you know, very very telling for what the journey would be for the next couple of months. UM. The good news is, you know, because it's a global company, UM, we have uh, we've been used to using video for a long time, so we continue to, you know, to to leverage that. UM. You know, a lot of my sort of aspirations of visiting all of our offices and really uh having that in person connection kind of had
to go by the wayside at least for the short term. UM, but we were able to kind of move quickly into how do we keep employees safe? UM, how do we pivot around our customers and what they need from us? Um, not just from a content perspective, but you know a lot of our customers, uh, you know, are struggling in the small and medium business space. A lot of agencies
are are struggling at this point. How do we support them and the messages that they want to give, how do we support them from a from a deal perspective, etcetera. So we pivoted very quickly to UH sort of our our COVID UH swat teams UM, and I think you know, over the last couple of months, we've we've now found at least some level of the new norm UH and
operating in the new norm. So tell us more about your customers and how they're doing now, you know, five six months into this pandemic, Because, as you say, you deal with a lot of small and medium sized businesses and we know that they have been hit very hard by this in general. What are you hearing from them at this moment? Yeah, So on the small and medium business side, what's interesting is there's kind of a tale of two stories here. One UM, You're right, there's a
lot of businesses that are just struggling UM. And so we definitely hear from customers that you know, come to us that still want to be able to communicate with UH with their clients UM during this time and need solutions that UM, you know that fit not just their uh,
their creative needs, but also their their budgets. Um. The other side of this, and you know, you know, you guys are probably seeing this as well, which is a lot of small and medium businesses that did not have a digital presence are now uh sort of really learning
what it means to have a digital presence. So interestingly for our business from a revenue perspective, the small embedient medium business segment has been one of the stronger segments during the pandemic um and you can think about it as kind of the Wix effect or the Shopify effect, where a lot of these businesses are really looking for solutions of how do how do I how do I sell my product online? How do I talk to my
customers digitally? And we sit, you know, square in the middle of that and just quickly and we're going to take a break and come back and delve more into it. But how did you keep morale up? Because that was that's a lot that you just listed and whether it's your clients or your staff, like, how do you do it? Well, we did it in a number of different ways, um. And there's a lot of converging themes over this, you know, over this time. First and foremost, we started to do
a lot of virtual events. UH so a lot more communicating with our both with our employees as well as with our clients. So we send a lot more communications of things that are happening UM, how they can participate, how they can take advantage. With our employees, we have a lot of virtual happy hours. We do a lot of virtual events that each of the teams can take advantage of. We gave them a budget to be able
to do that UM. But also, you know, uh in dealing with the realities of what's happening from a diversity and inclusion perspective. We've also made a lot of strides UM in getting both our community UM as well as our employees involved in how we can make a difference. Let's dive a little bit into story your last quarter, what was doing really well? I mentioned earlier that video downloads were doing quite well. How are you structuring your business for the back half of the year and even
based on where the demand is? Yeah, so you're right, there's definitely the industry tell lies behind what's happening with video on demand as well as social media use UM where that's really helping us UM and you know, we've launched several new subscriptions to respond to that, both for the small and medium business segment, which we just launched UM as well as additional subscriptions that we're going to
be launching later this year within our music segment as well. UM. So the way I think about our strategy going forward is obviously there's a lot of industry tail winds digitally that are helping us, but also UM. When you think about the use cases for UM. For us, it's it's very diverse, whether it's social media, websites, video creation, UM, you know, movie creation, but also some of the more
traditional media like print as well as merchandizing or direct mail. UM. And we want to move from a company that is entirely content focused UM to really being more solution focused UM. So what you'll see from us is the ability for our customers, not us to uh kind of get the raw assets, but really to be able to achieve what they're trying to achieve by simply running you know, being able to publish two social media or to run an ad UM. We're also launching creative services for our larger
customers going forward. Video is a big one for us. UM you know, especially right now when there's no uh, it's hard to produce uh, you know, large format videos. What we're finding is what our customers are finding is that we are a company because of our huge contributor base as well as global reach, that we are a place that they can come to to develop video assets during this time. UM. So between between the content, the tools,
and ultimately a complete solution, UM complete marketing solution. That's our focus going forward. So when you look across the entire media landscape stand and you worked at Meredith for at times, you understand both the digital and the and the more traditional side. Having run the digital portion of that well known publishing company. I do wonder. We hear from Guess a lot that the pandemic has accelerated certain
elements of businesses, things that might have been underway. We know that the media business we know firsthand, has been under incredible pressure, a lot of disruption going on. What has it accelerated in your estimation and where do we sort of come out of this? What are some things that we may see that are just utterly different when it comes to the broader media landscape. Yeah, that's a great question. You know what I think about it UM
and Meredith is a perfect example of this. UM. I see three kind of primary trends that are shaping media and advertising. UM. First, you have UM. You know, more than ever, consumers want content on demand UM. So that's first and foremost UM. And you're seeing a lot of that through uh, you know, mobile usage, through social media
usage UM too. Because of what's happening right now, media companies are realizing they can't just rely on advertising for their business model, so particularly because you have the large platforms like Google, UM and Facebook that are capturing a disproportionate share of those revenues UM. And then the last with the consumer privacy issues that are happening UH now it's forcing you know, publishers and media companies to completely
rethink their data strategies. So what I see happening is publishers and media companies are gonna really it's going to force them to take back control over their first party data. It's going to really make it's gonna force and it's happening. Companies are developing subscription models because they need to have that direct relationship with the consumer. They can't keep relying
on the platforms as intermediaries. So I think you know, what you're gonna see is actually, UM, while it's very challenging right now, companies that do that well and develop those relationships well are going to end up coming out much stronger than they were before UM and and have much more sustainable business models. So interesting. I feel like, you know, eight years ago, no more than that, ten years ago, I worked at an internet company. It was
exactly the opposite. It was like subscription model dead. UM. I have a really like nitty gritty, fun question to ask. I'm just really curious as to what UM your clients are downloading, Like, what isn't high demand right now? Yeah. So, over the last couple of months, it's really been, uh,
it's really been fascinating. There's a lot of you know, historically, you have a lot of fun with this category because you have a lot of fun memes and a lot of you know, fun stereotypes that you can make fun of, UM, you know as part of uh you know, creative images and and creative video clips, etcetera. UM. Over the past couple of months, we've kind of moved away from a lot of searches around face masks and covid uh too
much more work from home and home office. Now we're moving into fall and back to school um, and different types of yearly celebrations like graduation, um, etcetera. So, uh, we're we're moving a little bit, I would say, more into the norm around kind of the seasonal content that that people are, you know, looking for. But as you guys sort of had on the update around some of the Zoom results, one of the one of the constants for us is fun zoom background. So that, uh, that
looks like it's not slowing down anytime soon. Absolutely, all right, Well, congratulations on the promotion. It's a big job, and eager to see what happens with your business because, as you say, you're right in the center of some mega trends and say, at least standup. L off Ski is chief executive officer of shutter Stock.