Giorgio Fochesato, already a famous Italian contributor to iStockphoto have just been appointed as General Manager of iStockphoto Italia at iStockphoto European HQ in Berlin.

We had opportunity to meet Giorgio and run an interview on his new assignment.


Hi Giorgio! We just learn of your new assignment of General Manager of iStockphoto Italia. What will be exactly you role in the company?

Hi Antonio! Well, what I'm going to do in the next months is create a strong base for the Italian market. We need to create a structure to support all the Italian customers and enlarge the position of iStock in Italy. We need to establish new commercial agreements, find new customers and partners, improve the support service and make iStock more popular.
Being both Italian, we know the status of the photography market in Italy and the even increased difficulties generated by the global crisis. Companies are, right now, tightening control on wallets reducing advertising spending and many printed magazines have been forced to close: what do you think of the Italian market right now and what's the overall plan to bring business to iStock?

What I think about the Italian market is that there are plenty of web designers, graphic designers, photo editor and creative people who never heard about iStock. These people has to discover what we offer. I'm sure they will be very surprised when they will get in touch with our collections. Our quality is famous all over the world, we have more then 5 million files and with that huge variety of files we can cover all the needs of the image industry. No one else in the world is offering such quality of material at such low prices. If you ask to any photo editors in the World what is the best image they can use for their business, 99% of them will respond the cheapest. iStock is the answer of many of the problems of many companies and magazines. Why spend more if you have the best quality for less?
What's your professional background and how did u managed to get that job at world most successful microstock agency?

I come from the IT sector, where I worked as project manager for many years and I've even been traveling a lot around the world in my life. Traveling made possible to be here, it opened my mind and photography has always been my passion. I just started my photography business traveling and taking pictures. With iStock I found my professional way. As you know, I've been one of the first italian photographers who believed in iStockphoto. I jumped into the company in 2006, when the site was only in English, even before Getty Images acquired it. In the last three years I've been in touch with all the staff and people of the HQ. I met inspectors and administrators from all over the world. I've taken part at some Lypses in Europe and I had the opportunity to understand what is the great power of iStock: we are a family, we are a strong community of creative people and we want to make the market of photography easy and share it with everyone in the world.
You know that most of the weekly news magazines published in Italy source their imagery from traditional RM agencies: is iStock plan to persuade those buyers to switch buy of licenses from RM to RF?

As you probably know, many of our artists are also supplying some of their works to Getty Images. It means that our artists are already supplying their works to news magazines using RF licenses. It means that the quality of our works fit the needs of the market. We don't need to persuade buyers to switch to buy RF, we just let them know that we are here. When they will get in touch with us, they will automatically switch to RF. But I would like to focus the attention on the big opportunity we are giving to the small italian companies and the small web designers. We give them the opportunity to buy the same material that the big companies will buy, same quality. We want to make the world easy: unbelievable quality for few euros.
Will you be responsible for promoting all kind of contents available on iStock or you will focus on Photography only?

Working for iStockphoto Italia means be responsible for all the material we are offering: photo, illustration, flash files, videos and audio! Of course, it will take time, but I accepted this challenge with lot of passion and enthusiasm. Thanks Antonio!

To Giorgio, all the best for this challenging and exciting job in iStock!

Articolo in Italiano.