Companies tailor their stock library production around specific marketing messages. This UnitedHealthcare image emphasizes service to the insurance company's customers.
"Our [image] costs would be ten times greater without the image library, easily," says Michael Ainscow, creative services manager at HP's Personal Systems Group. "We've almost eliminated the need for stock from commercial stock agencies."
Image libraries are now widespread, especially in industries that rely on lifestyle advertising such as high tech, travel, pharmaceuticals, banking and healthcare. In the years since companies started experimenting with photo libraries to cut down on their stock photography costs, a number have become more savvy about production planning and licensing. The improvements are adding up to greater image utility, lower cost, and more return on investment.
HP's Holistic Approach
When HP began its collection, production was limited to images suitable for a few customer categories, such as the education and energy markets, explains Ainscow. But the payoffs were quickly apparent. By producing its own stock and controlling the licensing terms, the company cut its legal risks. The collection also enabled HP to establish a consistent brand appearance across regions of operation, and eliminated the fear of seeing the images it was using in competitors' ads. And last but not least, the savings were obvious.
"Getting rights-managed images became impractical. The cost of a complete buyout is outrageous," Ainscow says. For what a stock agency wanted to license three or four images, he could send a photographer around the world to produce dozens.
So that's what the company did more and more, to the point where its collection covers most of the marketing needs of its various business units and regional operations around the world.
HP keeps a tight rein on quality and consistency by working with a limited number of photographers—"five or ten a year, [and] now we don't rotate them as much as we used to," Ainscow says. (HP outsources photographer recruitment and stock shoot art direction to Creative-i Advertising and Interactive Media of Palo Alto). The photographers are trained in HP's style in a virtual classroom, where sample images are displayed and explained. And before photographers get any big assignments, they get small "tryout" jobs to make sure they work well with HP art directors and can deliver the style, quality and quantity that HP expects.
The company relies on its clout and a buyer's market to get photography on favorable terms. HP pays a fee plus expenses, telling photographers that it expects a volume discount in exchange for its multi-day (and often far-flung) assignments, Ainscow explains. Previously, HP negotiated for rights to perhaps 30 images from each assignment. Now, photographers have to agree to give HP the option to use everything they shoot while on assignment, and usage and license duration are unlimited. (To get around the usage limits imposed by modeling agencies, HP has established an in-house modeling agency, and recruits "real people" models at casting calls all over the country.)
Shoots are carefully planned around specific, pre-determined marketing needs. For instance, HP produces location shoots around "the kinds of images people print on our printers," Ainscow says. Topics include back to school, fall harvest, Halloween, and winter sports, to name a few. The images are eventually used in all types of packaging and promotions for printers, paper and related products.
HP also plans location shoots around particular products. Anticipating ads for printers and computers, for instance, Ainscow plans shoots in places those products are commonly used, such as home offices, business settings, schools and college dorms. Part of the planning includes surveying managers in different business units and regional offices to find out what types of images they need.
Scenarios are then developed on the basis of those requests. Photographers often have to switch models and props in and out of set-ups to meet a variety of demographic and cultural criteria. For instance, a shoot showing kids using computers in school might be shot with American kids, then Korean kids, so the images can be used to promote HP products in Korea.
In addition to shooting the pre-planned scenarios, photographers are expected to do what Ainscow calls "guerrilla shooting" at the location. In a school setting, that would mean wandering around to shoot "journalistic" photographs of kids at their lockers or on the playground. Or a photographer sent to Italy, say, to photograph scenes at home, in cafes, or in schools for the European market would also be expected to go out and shoot street scenes and cityscapes. Those images could be used in HP's marketing materials to set a scene or mood, and they represent yet another way that HP gets all it can for its investment in photo production.
Meanwhile, to maximize its use of the image library, HP takes pains to make it easily accessible. That begins with editing. When photographers submit their take, HP posts all the images on a private Web site. Product managers log in to make sure the products are set up and portrayed accurately.
Company art directors then review the images and use an electronic voting system to collectively identify the selects. Those images are finally sent through color correction and metadata processing, and posted in multiple sizes in a digital asset management system maintained by an outside contractor. HP's employees, ad agencies, and other partners can search the database and download images from anywhere in the world, just as they could with almost any stock photo agency collection.
A Targeted, Message-Driven Approach
Not every corporate image library is as buttoned down as HP's. California-based UnitedHealthcare, for instance, is still struggling with archiving and distribution. "Right now we do it the old school way, reproducing images on DVDs and then sending them to our creative partners," says Catherine DiFonso, brand management director for UnitedHealthcare.
But UHC has improved and streamlined its image library in other ways, particularly in the production area. Change came about because the company recognized a disconnect between its imagery and its messages.
"It might have been a marketing flyer about getting the most out of your health plan, with a picture of a dog, or something else that had nothing to do with the message," DiFonso explains. "Or there'd be pictures that portrayed healthcare as something completely opposite of people's experience with it, such as a picture of grandma jumping on a trampoline."
Photographer Dana Hursey, who has shot for UHC's library since 2001, recalls that he used to be given a list of "loose, broad scenarios" to shoot, such as "active seniors" or "seniors in family situations." Starting three years ago, UHC started planning shoots around research-driven themes and messages. The themes were still somewhat broad, such as "making healthy food choices" and "getting access to healthcare information."
But instead of relying solely on Hursey to interpret them, UHC turned first to its ad agency for concepts. They sketched dozens of comps, many of them conceptual images such as a chocolate box with the chocolates replaced by fruit, for instance. UHC would select 50 to 75 of the comps, and then hand them to Hursey with a proposed budget.
"I went through them and marked them low, medium or high cost, in terms of production," Hursey says. The list would be winnowed down to perhaps 30 to 50 images that UHC could afford to produce, with low-cost images offsetting the more expensive ones. Hursey would then shoot the selected images over a two or three week period.
"The thing that makes it cost effective and affordable [for UHC] is to do 50 images all in one chunk," he says. "Production costs [per image] go way down, styling costs go way down. I'm a fast shooter so I can get a good amount of images in one day. I get a higher fee because I work my ass off, but [UHC's] per-shot costs come way down."
UHC ends up with message-specific images that it uses on billboards, Web banners, direct mail pieces, brochures, posters, and in national print advertising. Not only is the company controlling production costs and getting stronger advertising for its investment, it has cut costs by changing its licensing terms. It used to license the images shot for its corporate library for a limited period, but that got too confusing and costly to track. So UHC now insists on unlimited licenses, DiFonso says.
The High-Volume Approach
Sheer volume is another approach to corporate library production. The idea is that a good photographer who can shoot really fast is bound to deliver enough serviceable images—and maybe even a couple really good ones, too—at a low per-image cost.
Jamie Appelbaum, a freelance art buyer who was until recently working for Ogilvy, has produced several corporate image library shoots. Clients ended up with images that enabled them to achieve a consistent look across all their advertising, and "they get way more" photography for their money, she says.
"You're not creating great art with a photo library. You want to come out with 20 or 25 iconic images that you could have shot on assignment, and the rest suitable for Web banners, coupons, point of sale, and that sort of thing."
To create one photo library for a pharmaceutical client, she worked with photographer Jim Erickson. One reason he got the job, she says, was because of his proposal for shooting at what amounted to triple speed. He brought two first assistants, and set up three scenarios in different rooms of the house. While Erickson shot one set-up, his assistants shot the other two at the same time.
"It takes a photographer with a good sense of humor, who is a workhorse, and doesn't have an ego. And they have to have a great crew," Appelbaum says.
Another job was a library production for Six Flags Inc., which owns a number of theme parks across the U.S. They wanted to pool ad resources by creating one image bank that all the parks could draw from, thereby reducing the company's overall marketing expenditures.
The strategy is to do a big production shoot at one park per season. Last April, Ogilvy hired photographer Michael Warren for a shoot at a Six Flags water park in Illinois. The goal was to shoot as many set-ups (and images) over five days as possible in order to create a big selection from the Six Flags parks to draw from, and use any way they wanted.
Appelbaum determined the scenarios with the client (based on time and budget constraints), and then worked with Warren's producer to figure out all the logistics in advance. The idea was to move from one set-up to another as efficiently as possible, so Warren could shoot constantly.
With a crew of more than a dozen people, Warren ended up shooting ten to 12 scenarios per day, switching talent in and out of each scene to cover a variety of demographics.
Remarkably, he shot 23,000 images, half of which were usable, and about 200 of which were ultimately used—some of them repeatedly—by Six Flags parks around the country. "It's a big undertaking to do these photo libraries," Appelbaum says. "The client might spend $300,000, which might seem like an enormous amount of money. But when you look at the cost of producing the individual shots, there's no comparison. It's an amazing way to save money."
In tough times especially, that's a line of thinking that can command the attention of company executives, and spur them to look for all kinds of ways to get the most out of an asset like an image library.
The (Short) Life Expectancy of Corporate Image Libraries
While corporations frequently demand perpetual usage rights to the images in their libraries, shelf life often imposes a practical limit on a company's return on investment. Products come and go, styles and esthetics change, and creatives get tired of using the same images over and over. After two or three years, most images have to be culled, and the collections have to be refreshed.
"People, cars and technology will date a photograph pretty quickly," says Michael Ainscow of Hewlett- Packard. Shelf life varies from image to image, but downloads of the images in HP's collection tend to drop noticeably after about two years, he says.
By five years, library images can look ancient. Robert Petkofsky, a senior art director at Arnold Worldwide, describes what Amtrak's image library looked like when he began to update it several years ago: "The [train interior] images looked old fashioned. The casting, wardrobe and color quality were dated," he says. "It looked like staged lifestyle stock, but it was of its time." Petkofsky couldn't use the train exterior shots, either, because Amtrak had changed all the graphics on its trains.
Companies with products and services that evolve quickly and appeal primarily to younger demographics—such as telecommunications and automotive companies—have to keep their image libraries current.
But some others, including healthcare companies, can stretch shelf life at least a little. "If you're shooting lifestyle for a pharmaceutical company for something related to say, a cardio drug or cancer treatment, you can pull the styling back to something generic and make it last longer. But much beyond three or four years, someone is still going to want to refresh it," says Matthew Goodrich. He is director of business development at photo rep agency Bernstein & Andriulli, and has helped a number of companies establish and update corporate image libraries in the last decade.
Photographer Dana Hursey says United Healthcare has tried to extend the shelf life of its collection by leaving out props that quickly date images, such as cell phones and computers, and by using conservative clothing, color and hairstyles. "Whenever we wanted to do something wild, they always dialed it back, and kudos to them. They extended the life of those images," he says.
But UHC's Catherine DiFonso says those efforts can only help so much. "From a practical standpoint, brands do evolve, so the way we communicate may not be the same three years from now." In other words, the images could still have some useful life in them, but they no longer fit the company's message and branding.
