TALK OF THE TRADE
Re-born in the USA: New CEO re-boots P BPI News speaks to the new CEO of the Photo Marketing Association Georgia McCabe on her whistle-stop tour of Britain, France and Germany to discover the challenges to the US photo market are the same ones faced by its European cousins – and find out what we do about them…
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here’s a new first lady of the PMA: Georgia McCabe has come out of retirement following a career that latterly took in photofinishing solutions at Fujifilm to help revitalise an industry facing well publicised challenges. BPI News: The last we heard from UK PMA Director Don Kennedy, there had been a big shake up of PMA in the States, with your own appointment and the wider canvassing of industry opinion. From that feedback you’ve devised a four-point plan for taking the trade forward. Perhaps you can talk us through that? Georgia McCabe: As an industry we have a few challenges we’re all aware of. I’ve been in the photo industry for many years; I’m old. My last job was as Senior Vice President at Fujifilm. We developed all of the software for the Frontier systems and all the software for the kiosks. And then we built all their online system. After I retired from Fujifilm in 2006 I went into consulting along with my husband Scott Brownstein, one of the chief inventors of Photo CD. In November last year I was asked by the PMA board to do an analysis and decide what PMA should be ‘when it grows up’. After we did that, they offered me the job in January… Q: So you came out of retirement to help save the industry, Georgia? A: Exactly. We have a big battle ahead of us. The first thing that I was challenged with was how should PMA be re-organized? Back in the heyday, we’d hire the Las Vegas Convention Centre and totally consume it… Q: Indeed. When I started in the photo industry 15 years ago PMA was always the big annual show to go to. A: Right. Well it’s not like that anymore. Recently PMA has been
partnered with CES, which was kind of sad, because CES is so massive, with hundreds of thousands of people, yet photography was mixed in with mattresses and windscreen wipers. You couldn’t really find anything that was telling you what the future of photography and our industry was or could be. So we needed to restructure. I closed down our headquarters and held a strategic two-day retreat in Washington DC, where we brought in 20 stakeholders representing all aspects of the industry – the camera side, the output side and the software side. We discussed what the industry needed and what we could do to better service it. What came out of that meeting was that there was a real need for somebody to pull everyone together. And we came up with four strategic ‘pillars’. Q: Before we get into that Georgia, I’m intrigued to know what the challenges facing the industry were identified as? A: Ah, there’s so many… well, obviously it depends on where you’re coming from. If you look at the specialty retailers they’re feeling the pain because people just aren’t printing these days. If you talk to the camera dealers, they’re feeling it because people use smartphones. If you talk to the software developers, they’re feeling pain because their customers are demanding so much from an integration standpoint. It feels like the industry has become so fractured. Even the photographers are frustrated because of the ‘mamarazzi’…
be a photographer and starts booking weddings. Q: We’re talking about amateurs coming into a professional market… A: Right, and they’re willing to charge less and provide digital files. The photographers don’t like that. The whole industry, no matter where you’re coming from, has drastically changed. So we need to look at what we need to do. The photo industry is not dying. Consumers are taking more pictures than ever. Last year they captured and shared more than 10 times the number of images that were captured at the peak of the analogue business. I believe there are opportunities now that are greater than perhaps they were back in the late 1800s, when George Eastman started evangelising photography but first had to educate the consumer about it. Right now, personalised images are by far the largest source of traffic on social media. Then there is the “cloud,” which my husband refers to as the ‘digital landfill’ in the sky… and there are a lot of new players – including Google, Apple and Amazon Prime – that we didn’t know before. Not all of them understand the responsibility inherent in capturing and storing precious photographic moments so that people will be able to access them in the future. Did you see the articles about Vint Cerf’s (Google Vice President) comments, as he was making this same point? Q: Yes, about the 21st Century becoming a digital black hole…
Q: You’ll have to explain that one to us. A: (Laughs) A ‘mama-razzi’ is a woman that loves photography, who goes out and gets a DSLR to take a couple of pictures of her kids, shows her friends, and then when they say “wow, these are great, can you take pictures of mine?” – all of a sudden she wants to
A: We actually had a conversation with Vint and although he was talking in general terms about digital information, he did point out that, from a photographic standpoint, the safest solution might be to just print your images. So I do believe that PMA can play a really important
role and help the industry as a whole. The first of our four action points involves how we empower businesses to effectively sell to and serve the consumer. We’re going to provide tools and resources to help our members build their business and create enthusiasm from the consumer for photography products, services and equipment. The goal is to create a better direct connection between the consumer and the service providers. So in May in the States we held National Photography Month. We built a site which you can access via celebratephotos.com and we posted tips and tricks for consumers to take better photos and show how they could turn them into creative products. We also added content for the trade, including sample Facebook posts, tweets and press releases. We saw a lot of the trade actually using
UK retailers/manufacturers can contact Georgia & her team via: Photographic Marketing Association International 26 July/August 2015 | BPI News