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To take the bad just as gracefully as the good, and seek opportunity in the changes we all face is how we at Splashlight focus our lens on the future. We are continuously experimenting, innovating, and changing how marketing and eCommerce content is created for our retail partners. This forced change from COVID-19 is the opportunity we should all embrace, as this is the time where great ideas are formed; where lean teams work together on solutions outside the box to elevate one’s business. It only takes one great idea to revolutionize how you work.

Over the past several months, we have made many changes to how we create content for our retail partners and here are a few examples:

Remote shooting

  • We built a network that allows client creatives to direct a shoot team remotely. 
  • This system allows the client full communication and visual access to the set, the shooting team, and all assets shot.
  • The opportunity created by this new way of shooting is that it is no longer required for clients to travel, meaning we can service any client worldwide.

Robotic Imaging Systems

  • We made investments in robotic technology development for both photo and video imagery. 
  • The opportunity created is a reduced on-set COVID-19 safe team that can produce editorial and e-commerce imagery for both on-figure and product. 
  • Another advantage created was a significant increase in SKU throughput, meaning a lower cost for image content creation.

CGI Imaging Systems

  • Allowing retailers to produce high-quality on-figure imagery at a low cost with a small COVID-19 safe shoot team with limited oversight and resources needed from the client.
  • The opportunity created is not just in the overall cost reduction to produce CGI content, but in the reduction of resources needed from the client resulting in a lower internal spend for content creation.

What’s the right solution for your retail brand/business?

If your need is marketing or eCommerce content or a combination of both, there is a solution out there for you. To determine what solution is best for your business, a deep dive into one’s creative (branding) is the 1st step. Understanding and developing a common creative goal that a team can work towards will unify your team and reveal the best path of how to get there.

Once you have a solid creative/branding foundation, now is the time for the next step: Where will this content live? Some retailers have fully branded editorial imagery on all their platforms i.e. website, social media, advertising, etc. and others have limited creative branded content where the focus is utilizing outside sources (advertising, social media) to drive customers to their site where branded imagery is solely comprised as part of the landing page.

What determines this split between fully branded content versus partial branded content is directly related to cost. Higher levels of creative content with many platforms will always come at a greater cost than a limited creative and marketing goal.

As all retailers are feeling the pinch from COVID-19, cost today is paramount, and many retailers are now moving towards a hybrid solution of utilizing new advanced imaging technologies with traditional forms of content creation. This is the opportunity available now for all retailers; as with a hybrid solution, a retailer can create highly branded marketing content for specific platforms i.e advertising, social media, landing pages, with e-commerce content produced by low-cost advanced imagery solutions. Thus revealing one path on how to achieve your goals as set by one’s creative and remain on budget.

Splashlight is one of the world’s leading content creation companies, with headquarters in New York and offices in Miami, Baltimore and Montreal. Their ability to deliver high-fashion photography and video in the high-velocity, high-volume world of e-commerce is made possible by a unique suite of technologies that extend and amplify the power of DALIM ES 5.5.

“Our clients are some of the most demanding luxury, jewelry, fashion and athletic brands on Earth”, explains Splashlight Co-Founder Benoit Lagarde. “Brands like Target, Bloomingdale’s, Under Armour, Macy’s, Victoria’s Secret, David Yurman, and The Aldo Group need us to deliver quality, variety, at the scale and speed of e-commerce – at a cost that makes sense to procurement. Without our long technology partnership with DALIM SOFTWARE, none of this would be possible.”

Indeed, the DALIM/Splashlight partnership has blossomed over a full decade. The purpose-built, battle-tested technologies have evolved to provide clients with efficient workflows and crystal-clear visibility into the entire production process. Clients gain time to efficiently plan and organize their creative assets and generate stronger images and videos on set. They can track enormous amounts of merchandise in deep detail, empower their creative process, automate content creation and create their own, personalized systems of accountability.

But efficiency is just the beginning of Splashight’s ambitions. Their system, aptly named Intelligent Imagery platform (or I²) is designed for a future defined as much by brilliant data as by gorgeous models, artful lighting, and superior styling. With that vision in mind – and deep experience creating assets every day – Splashlight has expanded its technical capabilities to include a powerful Inventory Manager and is investing in creating a soon-to-be-debuted encoding system called Genome Agent that will embed creative intelligence into every asset. Splashlight aims to deliver a complete, end-to-end solution for assets that get smarter every time they are touched along the way.

To advance toward that goal, Splashlight has upgraded from DALIM ES 4.5 to 5.5, and has migrated technical operations to the cloud.

“We are not managing hardware, but virtual servers, and headless services,” states Splashlight VP Strategic Technology Peter Gunther. “You can cluster virtual hosts to look like one data center. Because the services are virtual, they can move transparently.”

Rather than continue to operate their own data center, Splashlight made a decisive shift to the cloud. In addition, gaining dramatically improved development speed and scalability, they can now leverage a full stack of advanced tools and services on which to build, none of which would be available in an on-premises data center.

Critically, DALIM ES 5.5 lets companies use the AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) for data storage – by far the most popular standard object storage API for keeping unstructured data in the cloud. Unlike traditional file system interfaces, it provides application developers means to control data through a rich API set.

“Splashlight did a lot of customization to maximize DALIM’s APIs to build services that augment and enhance the functionality of DALIM ES for our users,” says Splashlight VP Strategic Technology Peter Gunther. “Our close partnership lets us push the capabilities of DALIM SOFTWARE to their absolute limits with complete confidence that their next version will be able to handle anything we can throw at it.”

Part of the power of the DALIM ES database is that it’s designed to store, retrieve, and manage document-oriented or semi-structured data. When you use Elasticsearch, which is included in DALIM ES, you store data in a JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) document form, which is easy for people to read—and for other machines to parse.

“Leveraging Elasticsearch has allowed us to build services for reporting that provide essential metrics to clients that were all but impossible to gather before.”

“Our vision of creating a world of Intelligent Imagery is an incredibly ambitious goal”, says Splashlight Co-Founder Benoit Lagarde, “and one that wouldn’t be possible to realize without the talent, dedication, and enthusiasm of our friends and partners at DALIM SOFTWARE. It has been a fantastic adventure so far, and we’re excited to continue building the future together.”

The senseless deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and too many more, are beyond wrong. 

Watching the violence unfold nightly is unbearably sad. That a person, especially of color, should suffer a violent act at the hands of racism, prejudice or discrimination is intolerable. We are deeply affected by the level of despair, anger, and fear we see on so many faces in the crowds. The pain is raw with emotion. Souls are wounded, possibly beyond repair. 

Many thoughts go through our minds as we try to make sense of it. No matter how strongly we believe it should not be the case, the abhorrent reality of racism and prejudice that people of color experience within our community remains a harsh truth. We were recently reminded of this with the video of Amy Cooper weaponizing her inherent racism against Christian Cooper (no relation) in Central Park.

For us, we firmly believe diversity makes us stronger and helps us lead infinitely richer lives. In our hearts and minds, we support diversity and believe respect, open-mindedness, and kindness are key to being our best selves. 

Still, we are also aware that we have unconscious biases to which we have talked about openly at work. We are ready to continue the tough conversations. We want to go there! We are very grateful to our employees who have helped us see their experience through their lens. These conversations enlighten our collective perspective, making us better friends, colleagues, and human beings.

We want to do more than just believe we are not biased. We need to seek to understand in spite of our bias and make real change in our society.  Society is an agreement that we make with each other with common ideals, rules, and practices.  All of which rely on us feeling that we are being treated fairly and with compassion.

To all of you who are feeling afraid, uncertain, alone, angry, or unheard in the Black community or elsewhere during this unimaginable time – Please know that we see you, we hear you and we stand with you.

In peace,  

James, Benoit, Eurel, & Bijou

As we continue to monitor the COVID-19 pandemic, our hearts go out to all of those who have been affected by Coronavirus both directly and indirectly. Like you, during these last few weeks, we’ve been focused on doing all the things we need to do to keep our employees, clients, vendors, and families safe and healthy.

Taking our guidance from the CDC, WHO, and Federal and Local Government authorities, we keep the health and well-being of our community at the forefront of our decision making. 

In support of social distancing efforts being made across the globe to help stem the spread of COVID-19, our leadership team has made the difficult decision to temporarily suspend operations at Splashlight.

We will continue to work in alignment with local authorities following recommendations that help support our community under these unprecedented circumstances. 

There is no mistaking the challenge of the moment, but at Splashlight, we pride ourselves on our tenacity, our work ethic, and above all, our resiliency. 

To our amazing employees, vendors, and partners, we will see this through together. Please keep yourselves and your friends and family safe. 

We are closely monitoring each new development as it is communicated by authorities and are looking forward to reopening as soon as it is safe to do so. We await the day we are together again in light and creativity. 

Stay safe and thank you for being part of the Splashlight Family.

Benoit Lagarde & James Ingram

LiiV™, the parent company formed by the owners of Splashlight, announced it has acquired Telmar™, the intelligent media insights company, with a 51-year track record and 25,000 users internationally.

The combination of Splashlight and Telmar will bring to market the new discipline of creative intelligence, which is a breakthrough way to gather data about creative campaigns and provide marketers with meaningful understanding of their audiences without invading personal privacy.

“LiiV was inspired by a vision for creative intelligence, which until now was carried out through Splashlight alone,” said James Ingram, Founder of LiiV and CEO of Splashlight and Telmar. “Telmar is another critical part of the creative intelligence roadmap. Their mastery of varied streams of audience data is key to unlocking commercial and creative success for over 700 clients, and a new generation of marketers.”

“At Telmar, we’re renowned as a trusted hands-on partner for the biggest agencies, brands and publishers,” said Corey Panno, Telmar’s Senior Vice President. “As part of LiiV, we’re looking forward to applying our expertise in media planning and insight mining to help marketers better address a new set of challenges.”

Operating under the same umbrella, Splashlight and Telmar bring a more complete, cohesive solution to the market. Creative intelligence technology measures consumers’ reaction to images in a way that helps brands reach the right targets and hone campaigns for those specific audiences.

In turn, creative intelligence is a key component to the emerging science of digital anthropology, giving researchers a non-invasive way to study how we live, work, and play.

The world desperately needs new inventions that help decision-makers understand digital life and its connection to physical life. Through digital anthropology, LiiV is providing new ways to understand the reality of how we live today, how we create identities, and how we socialize, all the while maintaining our personal privacy. This allows for deeper insight into how consumers engage with visual content and brand messaging, by taking into account a bigger set of data points around human behavior.

“The formation of LiiV is incredibly meaningful to us, not just as a business, but for what it will do for creative professionals worldwide. We want to provide better ways of understanding people, their behavior, and what makes them thrive,” said Benoit Lagarde, Founder of LiiV and Co-Founder of Splashlight, and Chairman of Telmar. “We’re starting with these two companies, but these are just the first connections in the rapidly evolving intersection of technology, creativity and human science, that make up the field of digital anthropology.”

About LiiV
Splashlight Holding LLC dba LiiV is a holding company founded to enable creative intelligence through advocacy, thought leadership, academic partnerships, and technology platforms. Founded by James Ingram and Benoit Lagarde, backed by Boathouse Capital, and led by a world-class management team, LiiV invests in and builds strategic, cutting edge organizations that sit at the intersection of technology, creativity, and human science.
For more information about LiiV and its subsidiaries, please visit LiiV.com

About Telmar
Telmar Group Inc. is the world’s largest independent provider of strategic targeting and media planning solutions to advertisers, marketers, agencies, media companies, and data suppliers. Over 25,000 users across 100 countries are supported by Telmar’s 51 year track record of providing innovations in data-agnostic solutions to analyze thousands of consumer and media data sets to assess target markets, audience, reach and frequency, and media performance.

We’re excited to announce our latest work for David Yurman’s website redesign. Beautifully impactful photography, created in close partnership with the brand. Splashlight is proud to showcase the efforts of our dedicated in-house team of art directors, photographers, stylists, retouchers and producers, in such an exceptional and elevated setting.

www.davidyurman.com