The need for stock footage has always helped clients with big ideas and smallish budgets do more with less. "I never talk about stock as an alternative to production," says Rick Wysocki, senior VP/motion brands and products, at the NewYork office of gettyone. "The role of stock footage is to help people realize bigger creative ideas than their budget allows. For a commercial trying to depict the world-wide frenzy of business, it may not be possible to travel all over the world and capture all the cities you want. Creatives should be able to get most of those icons from us."
Nonetheless, getting such imagery has always been a time-consuming search. In the bad old days, when a client wanted to find out what a stock house had available, he would need to have it verbally described to him by a company representative, then have a tape of the material shipped over. After reviewing the tape, he might find what he was looking for, or he might have to ask the stock house to send over more images. "That could be a two- to five-day process," recalls George Bartko, senior VP/operations of FootageNow. (FootageNow is headquartered in Atlanta, with offices in New York, Los Angeles and Stuttgart, Germany.) "It was very slow."
"It’s a well-shared opinion that the stock footage market hasn’t grown rapidly because in the past it has been difficult to access stock footage," agrees Rob Sherman, president/COO of Busybox.com, a Center City, Calif.-based e-commerce company that offers a royalty-free stock footage library. "You couldn’t see it; you’d have to have it described to you, and then you’d have to wait for a videotape to be provided. It was all very frustrating."
If recent trends continue, however, such methodology may become as antiquated as the rotary telephone or the black-and-white television set. When Ogilvy & Mather, New York, produced "Olympic Moments"—a multimedia presentation appearing for Kodak in New York’s Times Square—the creatives looked on the Web at the "Millennium Collection," from gettyone/Image Bank Films, New York, available for viewing at www.imagebank.com. They chose clips from the site, and a tape of material was sent over to the agency the same day.
And there’s more to come. As the Internet becomes an integral part of business for agencies, production companies, and suppliers, stock footage houses are increasing their presence online. Stock shops are merging and expanding, and all are offering slightly different variations on the same idea: Give the client more variety as quickly and easily as possible.
"The importance of the Internet to advertisers is in the immediacy it offers," explains Bartko. "Whether you are trying to decide what footage is out there, or whether you’re just brainstorming for ideas, you don’t have to wait or guess. You have quicker access to ideas and can decide what you want to purchase immediately."
"The Internet is important for all communications," Sherman concurs. "Stock footage is one of the tools of communications professionals. The Internet provides the most rapid means to find and buy stock footage; it increases speed. The Internet makes it a case of instant gratification."
Shared Ideas
The Web, say stock suppliers, also allows for an even greater degree of collaboration. "As the client talks to us, we can create a clip bin and put in the clips that they’ve chosen," explains Bartko. "Account executives can talk on the phone to the clients and discuss the material at the same time as each side looks at the clips, live on the screen. Being able to access them like that enhances communication abilities, and speeds up the process, which is always about getting them material yesterday."
Just as important as speed and communication is diversity of material, which is increasing as various stock houses join under the same corporate umbrella. Gettyone/The Image Bank and gettyone/Image Bank Films, were competitors of gettyone/Energy Film; the three are now part of the gettyone family of companies. Gettyone is a division of Seattle-headquartered Getty Images. Getty has assorted divisions—i.e. gettysource, gettyworks—that appeal to different professions. Companies under the gettyone umbrella have offices throughout the U.S. Getty acquired The Image Bank in ’99 from the Eastman Kodak Company, Rochester, N.Y. (SHOOT, 10/1/99, p. 1.). The various sites of the Getty companies are accessible through www.gettyimages.com. Energy Film was purchased by Getty in ’97. (SHOOT, 8/15/97, p. 7). Gettyone now has offices in more than 35 countries.
FootageNow, which is a spin-off of Atlanta-based strategic Internet services firm iXL, merged earlier this year with the Second Line Search family of stock companies. The newly merged entity is launching a site featuring a wide range of clips. Its beta test site, the e-Media portal, will go online in September, with the hard launch in October. The site is a partnership between FootageNow/SLS and Corbis, Seattle. It will carry over 1,000 hours of footage, many in packages with such titles as "The Gold Medal Collection," "The Lifestyle Collection" and "The Moving Century Collection." There will be 53 separate volumes, catalogued by decade and subject. The FootageNow/SLS family includes such stock houses as Hot Shot Cool Cuts, New York; Action Sports Adventure, New York; and Film Bank, headquartered in Los Angeles. Each of the various companies has its own site, and when the new portal goes up next month, all of the companies will be accessed through it.
"Our site will be rich in content," explains Bartko, who notes that it will feature "clip-based functionality. You can go in and request the selected clips you would like to purchase, or you can have our research assistant create an interactive clip bin, and the clients can go in and look at clips we find for them."
Mixing speed with diversity is also a selling point being pushed by the five-year-old Busybox.com. It recently announced the formation of Busyboxpro.com, an e-commerce site for stock footage that offers customers thousands of royalty-fee stock video images available for immediate download. It features a selection of both streaming and downloadable broadcast-quality digital film and video clips, which can also be provided in any videotape format. The new site also contains the imagery from Reelstock.com (SHOOT, 10/1/99, p. 18.), a site that offered more than 4,000 clips of footage and is now run by Busybox.com. That site was folded into busyboxpro.com. In addition to Busyboxpro.com, Busybox.com, which was founded in ’95, provides e-commerce solutions to imagery and entertainment companies, which have included, among others, Corbis, Visual Communications Group (VSG) and the National Basketball Association (NBA).
Besides its Internet offerings, Busybox has 12 CD-ROMS of stock material arranged thematically by category—e.g., "American Life, "Around the World" and "Sports and Recreation." Additionally, Busybox offers what it calls "production packages," compilations of 100 broadcast-resolution stock clips available in most video formats.
To add to their diversity, the stock houses are not just archiving existing images: They are creating new footage, as well. "We look everywhere—across music, fashion, film, paintings, photography, technology, news, and all areas of culture, plus we spend a lot of time looking at the fringes for new looks," notes gettyone’s acquisitions coordinator, Melissa Jacobson.
"Being very aware of what’s out there and being plugged into what’s going on in advertising, technology, movies, music and all areas of art, as well as the journalistic trades," says Jacobson, "allows us to provide a service as valuable to the advertising industry as it is to art directors and culture watchers."
Digital Only
For the future, many in the stock world are predicting that the Internet will eventually offer a completely "tapeless" world. "We have a work process now that is virtually all-digital for editing, searching and retrieving from the library. [We are] building powerful tools that allow users to search, retrieve and download material in a Web environment," says Wysocki. "Downloading the final elements is really just an issue of bandwidth."
"The other area that is less obvious but very important to the consumer is that the Internet allows us to become a completely tapeless corporation, moving internally from office to office," says Peter Kleinman, senior VP/marketing communications at FootageNow. "It speeds things up because we don’t have to send tapes around. We are better able to communicate internally. It increases efficiency."
Indeed, the chief drawback to instant Web access and use is the nature of the image. "You are looking at preview quality, so if you want a full master to edit into the piece, you still need a tape to ship to them," explains Bartko. "But by the end of 2001, I believe there will be broadband capability."
Beyond the delivery systems, there is another area in which stock footage companies are hoping to carve a niche: Web sites, Web-only commercials and other new media projects. "The availability of existing imagery will make a difference on the Internet," observes Wysocki. "Moving imagery can be extremely compelling."
"The Web has been a static, flat-file communication source," adds Dana Tower, VP/director of marketing and emerging market development at gettyone. "It is a heavy load of data but, as proven by forty years of television, moving images are better."
The problem is that producers for Web sites have more restricted budgets than those for television. "In a broadcast environment, you have a limited number of channels and a huge audience, so [a company] can afford to invest a lot of money in a commercial, reaching hundreds of thousands of people," explains Wysocki. "With the Internet, however, you have an infinite number of channels; you are narrowcasting and it is not cost-effective to invest as much money in commercials. But people’s expectations are still for high-quality material. So how do you generate that in a cost-effective way?"
That’s where stock houses and their new Web offerings come in. Most are looking at the emergence of broadband technology as a means of gaining entry into this new market. "You can enhance training seminars with visuals; or for clothing catalogues, you can give hard data on slacks or a skirt and also see people moving around in the outfits. And that’s just a rudimentary use," predicts Tower. "The fact is, this is a whole new world we haven’t even begun to touch on. When MTV started in 1981, no one thought anything could change television. Twenty years later, everything is quick-cutting, music-driven, in the MTV style. I think this is going to flip the cards just as dramatically as that." g
