Metro Creative Graphics

Overview

Metro Creative Graphics is a New York-based creative content service, founded in 1910, that supplies newspapers and other media companies with advertising art, stock photography, editorial features, logos and trademarks, templated special sections and online advertising tools. Its subscription library, delivered today through the Metro Creative Connection portal, serves publications across North America, helping local media companies produce professional advertising and special sections without maintaining large in-house art departments.

Metro is one of the oldest continuously operating services in American newspaper support. News media publishers have used its creative and sales-support services since 1910 to develop locally focused advertising, and the company — family-owned and operated through its first century — has adapted the same basic product, ready-to-use professional artwork, to each successive production technology, from printed catalogues of ad art to a searchable online library with digital ad-building tools.

Founded in 1910 and the Ad Art Catalogue Era

Metro was founded in 1910, when local merchants' newspaper advertisements were set by hand and a small paper had no staff artist. Metro's answer was the catalogue: books of prepared advertising illustrations, layouts and campaign material that a newspaper's advertising department could clip and reproduce for local clients. The earliest Metro art dates to that founding year, and the company's catalogues became a standard tool of newspaper advertising departments, supplying everything from seasonal promotions to automotive and food imagery.

The historical value of that output was recognised in the company's centenary year. In 2010 Metro donated its advertising art catalogue from 1937 — the first year for which a complete catalogue survives — to the permanent collection of the Newseum, the museum of news in Washington, D.C. The museum's curator of collections noted that the donation filled a gap in an eclectic collection of newspaper artefacts, and Metro's president and chief executive at the time, Robert Zimmerman, observed that the invitation had arrived in the company's hundredth year as a family-owned business.

What Metro Supplies

Metro's modern catalogue covers the materials a media sales and production operation needs. Its library includes ready-to-use images and graphics, stock-quality photographs, logos and trademarks, multiple-view automobile images and manufacturer photography, and a large collection of specimen advertisements — spec ads — that sales representatives show to prospective advertisers. It supplies copyright-free editorial features suitable for native advertising and sponsored pages, print templated special sections, online electronic sections and themed microsites, and marketing, sales and training materials, including its Plus Business publication for sharing profitable ideas among subscribers.

Special sections are a core product. Local newspapers have long published templated supplements for occasions such as holidays, home improvement, weddings, health and back-to-school seasons; Metro produces the editorial and design framework for such sections so that a local staff can sell advertising into them and add local material. The same logic drives its campaigns for shopping locally, community-event promotions and multi-advertiser pages, which give small publications professionally designed revenue features they could not originate alone.

Metro Creative Connection

Delivery is now digital. Metro Creative Connection, known as MCC, is the online portal through which subscribers search and download images, templates, ads and editorial features, replacing the printed catalogue and clip-art book. Through MCC, subscribers also access Metro's spec ad resources and tools such as MiAD Wizard, an application that lets sales professionals personalise specimen ads quickly, so a representative can show a local business its own name and offer in a professional design before a sale is made.

Metro has continued to enrich the portal's content. It introduced packages allowing qualified subscribers to add Thinkstock imagery to their libraries, and it folded in the food photography service and image collections described below. The direction of development is consistent: a single subscription gateway combining Metro's own century-deep art library with licensed photography and software that shortens the path from sales call to finished advertisement, in print or online.

Acquisition of LSA Creative Outlet

In 2017 Metro acquired the Creative Outlet business of LSA, a comparable creative service, in a consolidation of the newspaper-support market. The transition of Creative Outlet clients to Metro was completed by 30 September 2017: Creative Outlet's images and templates were added to Metro Creative Connection, its food photography service was enhanced and delivered to subscribers through MCC, and the combined libraries increased the creative options available to both groups of customers.

The acquisition also illustrates Metro's sales-centred philosophy. Transitioning subscribers gained access not only to more art but to Metro's spec ad library and MiAD Wizard, its shop-local campaigns, event promotions and idea-sharing publications, together with copyright-free editorial features and digital spec ads intended to help publications keep pace with changing advertiser demands. Metro described the combination as pairing sales tools and solutions with creative resources to open new roads to revenue for the acquired clients.

Who Uses Metro

Metro's customers are media companies — principally newspapers, from community weeklies to metropolitan dailies, together with other publishers of advertising-supported products and services across North America. For a small publication, a Metro subscription substitutes for an art department: production staff assemble advertisements, promotions and special sections from professional components. For larger organisations, the library supplements in-house designers and gives sales teams a deep inventory of specimen ads and campaign ideas.

The company's New York base, at 519 Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, places it in the historic centre of American publishing. Its services are used in both print and digital publishing, and its materials are designed to generate revenue in either medium. That revenue focus distinguishes Metro from a pure stock-photo library: its products are sold not as art for its own sake but as tools for local advertising sales, which has been the company's stated purpose since 1910.

Editorial Features and Special Sections

Alongside advertising material, Metro supplies editorial content. Its copyright-free features can be used in sponsored and native-advertising contexts, and its templated special sections and electronic sections provide complete themed packages — design, features and images — that a publication can localise. Themed microsites extend the same packages to the web. For resource-constrained newsrooms, such material fills pages and sections that would otherwise require staff time to originate.

This editorial supply is modest in ambition compared with a news wire — Metro features are service journalism and seasonal content, not reporting — but it is a genuine part of the syndication landscape. Generations of readers have encountered Metro artwork and features in their local papers without knowing the source, since the material is designed to appear under the publication's own brand as part of its pages.

Adaptation Across a Century

Metro's longevity rests on repeated adaptation of one idea. The printed ad-art catalogue served the letterpress era; the same library was reissued for offset printing, distributed on digital media as production computerised, and finally rebuilt as the searchable Metro Creative Connection with online ad-development tools. Each transition preserved the subscriber relationship and the catalogue while changing the delivery mechanism, and the 2017 absorption of a competitor's library shows the model still consolidating the market.

The company that reached its centenary in 2010 as a family-owned business presents itself as unmatched in serving the creative needs of media companies, pointing to the breadth of its resources — images, spec ads, stock photos, logos, auto photography, editorial features, templated sections and training tools, plus custom image, ad design and editorial services. Trade coverage in Editor & Publisher has chronicled its product launches and acquisitions for decades, reflecting its status as standard infrastructure for the newspaper business.

Significance

Metro Creative Graphics is significant as the survivor of the newspaper service industry: a company founded in 1910 to sell advertising art to newspapers that still supplies the creative raw material of local media in the digital era. Its 1937 catalogue's place in the Newseum's permanent collection acknowledges that the visual language of twentieth-century local advertising — much of it drawn from Metro's books — is part of the history of American news media.

For this directory, Metro represents the production-services branch of syndication. Wires supply news, feature syndicates supply columns and comics, and services such as Metro supply the art, photographs, templates and sales tools that make a publication producible and saleable. More than a century after its founding in New York, its library continues to reach readers across North America through the pages and websites of its subscribing publications.