POCSTOCK

About stock media

If you’ve visited a company's website, read a blog, seen an advert or marketing brochure in the past 25 years, chances are you've seen stock photos in action. Stock photos and videos are used everywhere by companies of all sizes as lower cost and less time-intensive alternatives to shooting photos or videos themselves.  

It's a $4b/yr global market, projected to grow to $7b by 2027.

The problem

For decades, within the stock media industry there has been an issue of lack of representation of various diverse groups including Black, Asian, Hispanic, Indigenous, LGBTQIA+, and disabled people of color. In today's advertising and marketing climate, diversity-focused content featuring members of these groups is in growing demand. At the same time, consumers of color in the US who currently spend a combined $4 trillion/yr annually want to see themselves reflected correctly in the ads that are targeting them by brands who spend $290b/yr. advertising to their consumers.

The solution

On November 2019, pocstock was founded by Steve Jones (tech entrepreneur), DeSean Brown (advertising exec), and Tamara Fleming (professional photographer) with a goal of becoming the premier diversity-focused stock platform and media company that provides companies of all sizes anywhere in the world with positive images featuring people of color.  As marketers, advertising execs, photographers, technologists, and also people of color, we've experienced these diversity challenges first hand for over the past 10 years and know how difficult it is to find images that tell the right stories. 

Our solution is a global business model that will allow us to influence the visual narratives of representation and inclusion for underrepresented cultures.

BTW - The POC in pocstock stands for people of color.

Why invest in pocstock?

There are many reasons why this is right the time to invest in pocstock. The need for diversity-focused content is in growing demand, and we're building the future market leader.

1. We're gaining traction with major corporations and ad agencies

We intentionally did not take on many customers during our first year in business. We first built our bespoke tech platform, infrastructure, and built up our stock inventory to a level that would make us a viable strategic partner when we entered the market. 

Well it worked! We opened publicly for business in 2021 with over 30,000 assets, and major corporations and advertising agencies have since begun to partner with us.

We also wanted to be able to provide our customers, mostly Fortune 500 companies and advertising agencies, with a holistic approach to providing them with the right diversity content to meet their needs. 

Here's what we offer them:

• Access to our stock platform - Our customers have access to our growing library of over 100,000 curated images available via standard or custom subscription plans. 
• Ability to develop custom content - If the images cannot be found in stock, or are so rare or specific they don't exist, we can leverage our network of contributors around the world to produce custom content. 
• Diversity consulting - Some of our customers hire our team for strategic diversity, equity, and inclusion projects.  They often times find value in our perspectives as people of color.

In most cases, major companies usually work with a limited number of approved stock media vendors. Usually, one of the market leaders such as Getty Images, Shutterstock, or Adobe Stock, and now many are choosing to add pocstock for diversity stock. 

The business case is pretty clear - if you're going to buy diversity stock content and a Black-owned company exists with all things being equal in terms of cost, quality, and quantity AND we provide a flexible business model, cultural intelligence, and are exclusively focused on diversity - why would you choose anyone else? 

2. Our business model is built for global scale

In 2020, we soft-launched the platform to contributors, with only 1,500 photos. Our goal was to build a globally scalable ecosystem that would position pocstock as the largest diversity-focused stock media platform in our first 5 years. We have since received over 170,000 photos, videos, and illustrations from our network of 600+ contributors (ie photographers, videographers and illustrators), and stock agencies around the world.  

Over the next few years, pocstock will continue expanding our contributor network into 195 countries, and curating millions of stock media assets. We currently sell content in the US & Canada, but will also begin opening additional sales channels in major international markets including LATAM, EMEA and APAC via direct sales and distribution partnerships.

Here's how it all works:

Contributors sign up to our platform and once vetted and approved they can upload their assets for review. Our internal team curates the assets (ie picks the ones we want, rejects the ones we don't). We then sell licenses and manage the rights for companies that use these assets in their advertising and marketing materials ie commercials, display ads, website banners, news articles, etc.

Many of these types of images have not been commonly seen in the media, until now.

We pay our contributors 25% - 50% royalties for each license sold.  Our pricing can range from $10/license if the asset is purchased via our small business-targeted Digital Subscriptions, or up to $250/license if purchased On-Demand.  

Pricing model here, https://www.pocstock.com/pricing

3. Our leadership team has the experience to execute on our vision. 

Our leadership team each has an average of 15+ years experience working at major corporations, advertising & marketing agencies, and producing media for clients around the world.

The bottom line

With the experience of our Founders and leadership team, the passionate supporters and advisors in our network and community, major customers, and the market's increasing focus on diversity, pocstock has all the elements to become a global leader in the years ahead.

Join us on our mission, become a member of our investor community today. We chose WeFunder as the platform to build our investor community, so you can become one of the many early stage investors taking an equity stake in our success.

What you should know about our offer:

• Pre-money valuation: $19,958,835
• Share price: $2.2745
• Securities: Preferred Stock