Why Flaunter Needed to Exist: The Future of Comms

I’ve spent most of my career writing stories about other people’s brands but crazily enough when it came time to writing about my own business – I never felt ready! I thought it was finally time to share the story of WHY we exist.

To start – what even is Flaunter?!

Flaunter gives media instant access to brands & their content for easy distribution and publishing. Our mission is to make it easier for brands to reach new audiences by connecting their content with the best storytellers around the world.

So, why Flaunter? What’s the problem we’re trying to solve?

Visual content is an increasingly powerful way for brands to express value, build trust, establish quality – and most importantly tell their stories.

After working in PR for over 15 years, I’d become increasingly frustrated by the difficulty of sharing brand imagery and content with media, retailer, blogger and influencer networks.

It was a mess – for everyone involved! Most often, all these incredible and useful assets lived in the dark corners of the emails and hard drives of publicists [me], marketers, photographers and brand owners. There was absolutely no way for media to access images [and associated credit details] on-demand in order to satisfy their ever-shrinking lead times. On the flip side, when brands and PR’s distributed their images they had no visibility and analytics on who downloaded their content and how it was used.

To give a real-life example of how the work of what one would assume to be the relatively simple task of filling a media page/photo gallery with images that brands are DESPERATE to have included in that page/gallery [because it increased their reach and therefore sales] was actually getting done, imagine for a second that you’re a junior editor at a lifestyle website….

You’re absolutely SWAMPED with work. You have to produce five image galleries a day with at least 10 new images per gallery – just to keep up with the demands of your publishers [because they have to keep up with the demands of today’s audiences…]. Your first gallery of the day is focused on the new Pantone colour POPPING PINK. You want the latest images from fashion brands, beauty brands and interiors brands that work with this colour.

So….. you go to your email. You try to remember all the appropriate brand and PR contacts where you might be able to fill your brief. You email them, usually individually. You ask them to send any examples of what they have that might suit. You ask them to send these images in low res though, so your inbox doesn’t crash and burn when they get back to you.

You get 50 emails back and now you need to find a way to search and sort through what’s come in. 80% won’t work with what you had in mind [70% of that is definitely POPPING PINK but it’s just ‘not quite right’ – but how is the brand to know that?!]. So, you’ve distilled your choices down to 10. You email your contacts now asking for the high-quality versions of the images, plus pricing and credit details. 5 of those contacts get back to you straight away – the other 5 might get back to you tomorrow…. You’re not quite sure…

So, by now you’ve got half your gallery filled. But you need 5 more products. You remember that someone in your office last week did a story last with a pink thing… now, if you could just figure out how to find that image… You’ve also got a few Dropbox links from great brands with great content, but where the hell is that folder with the skirt that would be perfect for the POPPING PINK gallery. Damn – that’s right. It was shared via a WeTransfer link and now that’s expired….

Argghhhhh… you just need to finish the job so you throw something in that you’re less than happy with and hit publish. Now on to the next story…

I think I need a chamomile tea to de-stress after sharing that experience!

But wait, there’s more. Now imagine you are a small brand. You’re running a million miles an hour, you’re doing EVERYTHING yourself, including PR and you’re trying desperately to build media relationships. You have beautiful imagery that you’ve poured your heart and soul into creating and what?! POPPING PINK!! OMG you just created a WHOLE COLLECTION inspired by that specific Pantone colour. Amazing! It’s perfect! But hang on…. You didn’t get included in the junior editor’s email list because she forgot about you. She was so busy trying to get s**t done that she automatically went out to her usual contacts and didn’t have time to think about how she could discover new brands and images [which she’d LOVE to be doing more of!]. So you’ve missed out 🙁

And how about that fancy big brand – bigger team, bigger budget and TONNES of imagery ready to go. Well, life ain’t easy in that PR & marketing department either. Did you think managing 200 product images was hard? Try 5000 per collection. So you’re Martha and you’re a PR Manager up to your eyeballs in line sheets, internal meetings and product launches. You get at least 10 emails a day from junior editors needing images. You desperately want to find the time to reply – it’s a super important part of your job. But you can’t find enough hours in the day. And going through your clunky internal server, with limited to ZERO search capabilities and trying to find those 100 POPPING PINK images you know you have, and then somehow sending them via email [does this junior editor prefer Dropbox/WeTransfer/email – arghh! you just can’t remember] just feels way too hard.

I could go on and on with examples like the above – involving bloggers and access, regional and international publishers and access, retailers and access to imagery from the brands they stock….

After years of living this problem, it seemed like a good time to start working on a solution.

Flaunter provides a solution for both sides of the market. And by bringing media & brands closer than ever before, any brand’s visual content can be tomorrow’s media story.

For brands we:

• Help PR and sales teams to communicate and sell better;

• Help increase their reach by simplifying image distribution;

• Help create stronger connections with media;

• Give teams access to data so they can learn and grow; and

• Help even the smallest business look and act like a big business.

For media we:

• Simplify the way all publishers and storytellers access brand imagery;

• Help create stronger connections with brands;

• Enable journalists to have full editorial control;

• Help surface new brands & their content; and

Makes it easy to access free content on-demand so deadlines and budgets don’t restrict how many stories can be told.

That’s us, Flaunter. Where every picture is a story 🙂