We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Nicholas Rhodes a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Nicholas , appreciate you joining us today. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?
Between 2015 and 2017, when I wanted to move away from being NickyDigital, I realized I’d have to take a major risk if I wanted to continue to be challenged and successful as a creator. I looked for corporate opportunities and met with a few headhunters, but the type of job I wanted didn’t really exist. So I stepped out of my comfort zone and took a course in digital marketing.
Starting a business with employees instead of just working for myself is definitely the biggest risk I’ve ever taken, and that first step of taking a marketing course affirmed I was making the right move. In the course of learning digital marketing terms, I had the epiphany that I had already “invented” digital marketing without realizing it. I just didn’t know the terminology for any of the things I was already doing, like using event photography in emails and on social media to let potential guests know what they might be missing — and be ready to buy tickets for future events. Turns out those ten years as NickyDigital even included successful marketing strategies my new professor wasn’t aware existed yet.
In 2017, my “dude-with-a-camera” business transformed into OutSnapped. We are now in year 7, and it’s been a tremendously rewarding experience.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I began my career as an event photographer, and became well-known as @nickydigital for the tens of thousands of photos I captured at high-profile events and parties in the NYC area. Like many artists, I soon realized that making a living from your work is complicated, and that leveraging technology was key to creating a viable, scalable business model.
In 2017, I founded the photo booth agency OutSnapped and started bringing photo booths with fun and customized themes to conferences, festivals, and other events, to create unforgettable memories for attendees. I’m a tinkerer — I love new tech — and to help OutSnapped weather the pandemic, we pivoted into innovative digital photo booths so clients could have similar shared experiences in real-time, anywhere in the world.
During our first five years, OutSnapped worked with brands including Netflix, W Hotels, Amazon Studios, Slack, HBO, Calvin Klein, and TED. In June of 2023, OutSnapped launched a first-to-market, patent-pending AI photo booth that took things to a new level.
I’m incredibly proud of this unique tool, which can render hyper-realistic imagery of a person’s AI avatar in any setting in real-time. With analytics and audience engagement tools built in, the generative AI photo booth offers infinite possibilities for CMOs and event planners to create viral content that centers their audience anywhere from a movie premiere to a retail pop-up. It’s the difference between photoshopping a body into a premade background and creating a personalized avatar that can do more or less anything.
Two recent examples for clients I loved working on were in very different fields: law and real estate. A legal start-up wanted to engage trade show guests, so we set up an AI photo booth that turned participants into a judge presiding over a case, rendered as a classic courtroom sketch. For Sotheby’s, I creative-directed a project to deliver social media shareables for their top-performing real-estate agents. Each agent took a snapshot and answered a few multiple choice questions about their ideal home preferences using our AI digital photo booth, and received personalized, and beautiful images of each agent posing in front of their ideal dream home within minutes.
Outsnapped has also worked with teams and agency partners at Enterprise, Intuit, and SoFi on experiential marketing initiatives with the new tech, which have been covered in Fortune and AdAge. We also partnered with the SalesForce World Tour in NYC and were featured as exciting emerging tech in the generative AI space by Axios at their AI+ Summit in San Francisco.
Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?
Incorporating new technology trends is key to making events extra special, but corporate teams and event planners don’t always have the time or resources to keep up. At the core of my mission is to continuously push the limits of what people imagine a photo booth is and can do.
When the AI news storm hit the media in 2023 we had already launched our patent-pending AI photo-booth, and I think our corporate clients and agency partners, especially CMOs and HR teams, really appreciate that nimbleness. We’re hyper-focused on creating engaging experiences showcasing brand values that are shareable directly from participants’ devices, within three minutes of the initial image capture.
Because I started my career as an event photographer, I have always been more visible to potential clients than perhaps the average entrepreneur — it comes with the job. Every time I am at a party or corporate event, no matter how large or small, I have an opportunity to build OutSnapped’s reputation by simply making eye contact and smiling in the direction of other event guests, and of course, providing an exceptional experience that’s ahead of the tech curve.
If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, it’s important to remember that the more you are out and about in your area of expertise, the higher the probability you’ll be in the right room when someone can use your help. Being present is also an opportunity to participate — and help shape larger conversations about your industry.
Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.
I think the trickiest thing for a “non-creative” person is to understand just how creative they themselves are. When the average person is asked to describe creatives, they think about people with skills like acting, making music, painting, photography, or penning novels. They might think that creatives are either anti-social genius-types or out-size personalities who wear mis-matched prints and maybe even have a handle-bar mustache.
But one thing I learned on my journey is that being creative doesn’t require a special expertise in a skill or an offbeat wardrobe. I think of creativity instead as problem-solving: If you’ve made it home after a long day, you’ve probably used creativity to get there. Maybe you invented a new meal from whatever you had in the fridge so you didn’t have to go to the grocery, or you used your imagination to envision the sights and sounds of a tropical vacation while you’re trapped in a dull meeting. That’s creative!
With AI, you can take those same problem-solving skills and make a photo or painting.
If you want to create a landscape for a planet no one has ever seen, AI can render a mere fragment of an idea in seconds from simple prompts. You supply the idea, and AI provides the skill to render it. It’s a super cool creative process that allows you to try things out, keep what you like, and reject what you don’t, however many times it takes to realize your vision.
One of the biggest rewards of being a creative director who is fluent in AI is being able to communicate to clients the tremendous potential to personalize customer and employee relationships, even when they’ve never used the technology before. I’m especially proud of our work with SoFi, which allowed us to combat bias in AI by capturing images of women in a pop-up booth in NYC that were transformed into photos showing the women as financially successful, and then used to teach AI models to unlearn stereotypes. I’m very excited for the coming year as this technology gets better and better.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://outsnapped.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/outsnapped
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/outsnapped/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickrhodes/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/OutSnapped
Image Credits
OutSnapped