Stock footage companies have literally been filling holes in commercials for years. In its simplest role, stock footage libraries provide elements for spots that producers can’t easily create themselves. Perhaps they need an image of the sun setting in a tropical location but don’t have the means–or the time–to get to the Caribbean or South Pacific.
Now, the roles of stock companies–along with their contributions–are growing as they increase their offerings and form powerful alliances.
Getty Images, headquartered in Seattle, includes collections under the Image Film Bank, Archive Films, Digital Vision and Photodisc banners. Additionally, Getty teams with a number of what it calls image partners, offering footage from those companies. The most recent example is Getty’s new partnership with Universal Studios, whereby Getty represents the studio’s film library. Other image partners include Artbeats, Rubberball Productions, and Triangle Images. “Through Image Bank Film we represent anywhere from two-hundred fifty to three hundred different filmmakers and production companies who go out and create material in conjunction with us and our needs, which come directly from the marketplace,” explains Karen McLaughlin, Getty’s director of Film Image Partners.
The deal with Universal expands Getty’s film offerings with footage from feature film (Apollo 13, Out of Africa) and television (Columbo, Miami Vice). “The attraction for us and our customers is that this material was created with the same multi-million of dollars that go into what people see in the final cut of the film,” McLaughlin relates. “So there’s not only that tremendous production value, but there’s also the fact that some of the best craftspeople in the industry have worked to create this material.”
The BBC Motion Library also maintains a high-profile relationship, though it is a bit more mature. They have represented the CBS News archive for approximately three years.
For the BBC gallery, this rounds out its offerings, giving clients access to footage of news and world events from an American perspective. The BBC library includes clip licensing from any production in its archive, which goes back 70 years, and the CBS archive dates back to 1953.
An example of how the CBS News archive partnership helps to set the BBC Motion Library apart in the marketplace is a commercial they worked on for DirecTV through BBDO New York. “Forward,” directed by Noam Murro of Biscuit Filmworks, Los Angeles, shows a young boy watching TV in various locations–he ages throughout the clip. The BBC was able to license footage from I Love Lucy and The Dick Van Dyke Show though CBS’ entertainment division and juxtapose it with archival news footage of the first moon landing and the Berlin Wall coming down.
Newcomer Thought Equity’s content comes from approximately 400 individual suppliers who range from large archives to independent producers and directors. Thought Equity was founded in 2000, and began offering its products in ’04. As a management licensing company, Thought Equity’s efforts are focused on differentiating themselves with their breadth of inventory and ease of user experience, says CEO Kevin Schaff. The company has all of its 35,000 clips online in a “ready now format.” “We do the speed view, which is incredibly unique because it takes a significant amount of time out of the preview process,” he relates, likening progressive downloads, a popular format, to dial-up Internet services, while he compares speed view to broadband, because “you literally just roll your mouse over it and it immediately plays full motion”
UNIQUE OFFERNIGS
In addition to expanding their collections through partnerships, libraries are also introducing new formats to their clients. The BBC offers a short-form program catalog with clips that range in length from ninety seconds to four minutes in length (though they can be used in 15-second segments) while Thought Equity has production-ready spots in its online catalog.
Amid the editorial footage that includes sports, news and current event footage, Thought Equity’s Schaff explains that the fully produced commercials in Thought Equity’s library satisfy a need in local and regional markets. “The number one barrier to advertising on cable or broadcast in local or regional areas is the creative cost,” he explains. “So recognizing that as a barrier to the advertising space, we said, ‘There’s a lot of great commercials out there–not nearly as many commercials that are produced on spec as there are just raw footage clips. But they have a tremendous value add to that market so let’s see how the market would respond to them,’ and they have responded really well.”
The clients for production-ready commercials include cable and broadcast ad production centers, which help people who want to place ads on TV, small businesses who want to deliver the spot to the cable companies themselves, and large corporations who use them for trade shows and corporate training events.
The vignette-type programs from the BBC are also complete and ready to go, explains Jan Ross, senior VP of BBC Motion Gallery, which has offices in Burbank, Calif., New York, London, Sydney, Tokyo, and Toronto. Their content comes from longer-form programs in the BBC archive, which are then edited and ready for use. The clips are often used as bumpers between television programs, and as microprogramming on the Internet. An example is a humorous clip featuring lions in their natural environment who appear to be talking to one another about their surroundings and the dynamics that exist between the males and females–it’s the same old story between men and women. The females discuss how they do all the work and the males, so called kings of the jungle, nap all day. CHANGING
LANDSCAPES
Giovanna Righini, executive producer at Clear, a licensing, research and clearance house in New York, says that advertising clients are often looking for unique or unusual imagery. She points to “Anthem,” a spot for Allstate Insurance out of Leo Burnett USA, Chicago, featuring The Flintstones. (Samuel Bayer of bicoastal RSA USA helmed the commercial.) For the spot, she had to negotiate a special clearance with Hanna-Barbera.
Clients aren’t seeking simple images like a tide washing ashore, Susan Nickerson, owner of Nickerson Research, Los Angeles, notes. “The tendency,” she says, “is they will come to me if it’s a more complex need, or they will come to me because they want–even if it sounds like a pedestrian request–to dig deeper and find more unusual, obscure sources. Or, sometimes it’s just volume–there is so much footage that they want someone to manage it.”
Another change in the stock footage landscape that Nickerson has noticed is that she used to get calls for stock footage when it was incidental to a spot; these days, the footage she is seeking out is pivotal to the creative success of the work. One notable campaign she was involved with was “Impossible is Nothing,” directed by Lance Acord of Park Pictures, New York, for adidas and agency TBWA/180, Amsterdam. For “Long Run,” her pursuit of footage of Muhammad Ali running through Africa led her to a warehouse with material that she estimated no one had touched in 25 years. Without images of the boxing great, it’s unlikely the spot would have been made.
NEW HORIZONS
One important new outlet for stock footage companies will likely be wireless providers. Nickerson said it is one of the most recent aspects she has had to deal with for her clients. For example, in the course of securing rights for images to be used in a Nike project, Nickerson needed to secure additional rights to use the imagery on wireless technology.
“It’s really up to us now as a content provider to look beyond today and try to look down the road to where the industry is going and to manage our footage accordingly,” states Michael Albright, creative director for BBC Motion Gallery. “So, for example, one huge area which we are uniquely positioned to service is mobile and wireless. Suddenly now stock footage is changing because you’re not just looking for footage that is going to fill a hole, you’re looking for footage that’s actually going to tell a story or is actually going to be content that you need.” His perspective applies to the Internet as well.
“For us,” Albright continued, “the thing that’s really great is that our library, because it’s a programming library, the content is very different than you’d find [with more traditionally defined stock footage]. With our content, you’re able to tell a story because much of it is sequential.”
Both McLaughlin of Getty Images and Albright say their libraries are in talks with wireless companies about providing content for mobile phones. Albright noted that BBC Motion Gallery is being seen as a creative partner, at least in the collaborative stage and often in the production stage.
