MarTech360 Interview with Christina Kyriazi, Chief Marketing Officer at PhotoShelter

“Customers told us they want AI to take on the tedious work, but want guardrails included that leave decisions to them and protect their library.”

Christina, your career moved from shopper insights and customer research into product marketing, revenue strategy, and executive leadership. What early lesson about customer behavior continues to shape the way you approach marketing decisions today?

My career started in analytics and customer insights, and I learned early on that customers are the best teachers a marketer has. Talking to them takes time and money, and it’s worth every bit of both. It’s how you build campaigns that feel human and give people something they actually want to see.

When marketers skip that step, it shows. In our latest report, Instagram was the top platform for marketers (56%), but it ranked last among the big four for consumers (37%), who favor YouTube (62%). That’s the kind of gap you only catch by asking your audience directly.

You have described yourself as the Voice of the Customer in business decisions. As a CMO working across product, sales, and customer teams, how do you ensure customer insights influence business priorities and translate into meaningful action?

A big part of my job is making sure what we hear from customers reaches product, sales and leadership, and doesn’t stay inside marketing. Research is one way I do that. It’s also why we regularly survey marketers, creative teams and consumers, and what we learn shapes both what we build and how we advise our customers.

At Ekos, you helped redefine the ideal customer profile and introduce a pricing strategy that contributed to a reported 300% increase in average contract value. What did that experience teach you about connecting customer understanding with product positioning and revenue growth?

At Ekos, we aligned our pricing packages to the product’s value drivers and the needs of different-sized customers. Smaller customers could get on the platform with a basic package that didn’t have all the bells and whistles, and customers with more complex needs could buy a higher tier with more features and integrations. That pricing strategy led to a 300% increase in average contract value.

What made it work was listening to each customer segment, understanding what drives it and matching that to the value the product brings.

PhotoShelter's 2026 research found that 46% of surveyed professionals saw content getting stuck in review, while 70% said approval delays affected revenue-generating work. Where do you see the biggest bottlenecks in enterprise content operations, and what needs to change?

The biggest bottlenecks usually show up after the content is made. That’s because much of what gets decided during the review process should have been agreed upon before content creation began.

And those review cycles add up. A global study of marketers and agency professionals found it typically takes five rounds of revisions to get an idea approved. On social, where a trend can be old news within days or even hours, that delay can mean missing the moment entirely.

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Teams can address this by agreeing on a brief before production begins and using tools to collect feedback in one place. That gives reviewers a shared place to provide input and helps creative teams keep track of requested changes.

Having a centralized library of pre-approved, on-brand content also helps. Teams can find assets that already meet brand standards, check their usage rights and reuse approved content without repeating the same review process. It also gives creative teams examples of approved work to reference when producing something new, helping reduce revisions from the start.

PhotoShelter's AI Assistant allows teams to manage content library operations through natural-language instructions while retaining approval over proposed changes. What did customer feedback teach you about making AI genuinely useful to creative teams without taking control away from them?

Customers told us they want AI to take on the tedious work, but want guardrails included that leave decisions to them and protect their library. That tracks with our AI research, where 76% of marketing and creative professionals said they have concerns about the accuracy of AI-generated content.

So the PhotoShelter AI Assistant handles the busywork, like renaming thousands of files or filling in missing metadata from a plain-English request. It shows the plan first, and nothing changes until a person approves it. Our AI Assistant also can’t perform destructive actions, like deleting assets, and it operates within our existing user permissions, so users can’t take actions with the assistant that they are prohibited from taking otherwise.

PhotoShelter's acquisition of Socialie expanded its capabilities from managing digital assets to activating content through employees, partners, and other stakeholders. As brands extend their reach through these networks, what makes content distribution both scalable and authentic?

Scale and authenticity work together when content comes from people audiences already trust. Our research found 61% of consumers trust a brand more when its content, like video, feels authentic, and 36% trust it more when it features real customers, employees or creators.

The NFL is a great example. PhotoShelter has powered the Super Bowl since 2014, and more than 1,500 NFL players are on our content distribution platform. During games, photos go from the field to editors to players’ phones, often by the time they’re back in the locker room. After one Super Bowl, 13 photos of players with the Lombardi Trophy generated more than 40 million social impressions. The Buffalo Bills have seen their social reach grow more than four times by sharing through players’ accounts.

Ultimately, scale comes from making sharing easy. When employees and partners can grab approved content and post it in a few taps, no one is digging through texts and DMs for the right file.

You have restructured PhotoShelter's marketing organization across content, demand generation, sales development, product marketing, and customer marketing. What have you learned about bringing these functions together to create a more connected, revenue-focused marketing operation?

It was important to me to align the marketing team to the customer journey. Each part of the team maps to a stage, from driving awareness to demand and conversions, all the way through retention and growth with existing customers. That structure keeps us close to the customer and focused on the outcomes the business needs.

As organizations invest more in digital content, how should they measure the value of what they already produce? Beyond asset discovery and time savings, which indicators best connect content management and distribution with meaningful business outcomes?

Volume tells you very little. Brand and product videos make up just 17% of the video consumers engage with most, so making more won’t fix that. I’d look at what the content does for the business:

1. Reach: How far content travels beyond your own channels. Tools like Socialie get approved content into the hands of athletes, employees, sponsors and partners, so it reaches their audiences too.
2. Revenue: Whether content helps sell and deliver sponsorships. For example, when a team can send sponsor-branded content to players and track how it performs, it has proof to show partners their brand is being seen.
3. Analytics: Engagement and reach by asset, including posts on accounts you don’t own, so you know what’s working and can do more of it.

If your best content isn’t showing up where people watch, it won’t drive much.

As AI makes content creation, discovery, and distribution increasingly accessible, what will distinguish organizations that turn content into a lasting business advantage? How do you see PhotoShelter evolving as enterprise content operations become more intelligent and connected?

AI made content fast and cheap to produce. Our research found 85% of marketers use AI somewhere in video production, and consumers have noticed. Nearly all of them (91%) have seen more AI-generated video over the past two years, and “looks AI-generated” is now the top reason they scroll past a brand video.

I think we’ll see teams make fewer, better pieces of content and get more value from what they already have. AI can handle the work around it, like finding footage, tagging files and making versions for each channel, so people can focus on what audiences want to watch.

For PhotoShelter, that means helping customers collect, manage and share authentic content in one place. Our UGC tools help them gather it, our DAM keeps it organized and our social content distribution tool, Socialie, gets it into the hands of the people who share it. We’re also building PhotoShelter into the tools teams already use, so content is easy to find wherever they work. The goal is to get the right content to the right people fast, while the moment still matters.

Thanks, Christina!