ASMP: Rights-managed Stock vs. Royalty-free Stock

Is Royalty-free (RF) the bargain they claim?

In photography as in anything else, you get what you pay for. Royalty-free (RF) stock may look like a bargain. But it has some serious drawbacks too and these can affect the value of what you buy.

Duped.

The biggest worry is that another designer might easily pick the same image. RF collections are marketed far and wide. You and your competitors have the same CD’s and subscriptions and so do many total strangers. Anyone can use those images at any time for any purpose. That means you must gamble that the sheer number of images in all the competing RF collections will make a duplicate unlikely. On the surface it may seem like a safe bet but there are reasons why not.

Leaders get followed.

Advertisers, art directors and editors tend to follow the current styles and trends in commercial imagery. Even if you are the leader and a maker of new trends there are plenty of less original people in your business; the herd instinct operates here just as it does elsewhere.

During the dot-com boom for instance, quite a few advertisers thought the PhotoDisc’s picture of George Chen, a vaguely Asian lad with spiked hair would evoke 20-something trendiness and Internet savvy. And it did - briefly, until the image got overexposed.

Term-Limited.

RF published select images for their collections that have broad appeal. Then they key word them to support image searching. And because they use a controlled-vocabulary word list, everyone who is building a campaign around a concept- a seasonal theme, and emotional association, a product category – has to work within a specific range of terms. The result is that the same images are likely to turn up on every designer’s list.

Why not the best?

After a word search has found some candidate photos, each designers will pick the best. You see the problem: Because EVERYBODY wants the best, the relatively few good choices stand a significant chance of being picked for many projects.

Collision.

When two designers pick similar images to illustrate their ideas, they both have a problem. Perhaps the products are grossly disparate, such as health aids and mortuary services. The October 2004 issue of Consumer Reports got a laugh at advertisers’ expense from just such a situation. It’s even worse if the products are similar and the clients are bitter competitors.

It’s not just a theoretical problem: In 2004, Dell and Gateway featured the same model and the same location in their back-to-school campaigns. And it must have been a lovely May morning in Paris when Wanadoo and Cegetel, two competing providers of high-speed Internet access, posted the same photo- Photoshopped a bit, but easily recognizable – on their respective home pages.

 

Blogged.

In olden times- say, before 2002- you could hope that most of your target customers wouldn’t notice an oopsie like that. Today, there’s a horde of bloggers ready to tell the world about each and every marketing blunder they can find, and they have the skill and patience to find quite a lot.

Got Papers?

RF production is a high-volume, quick-turnaround business. Not all RF vendors are equally careful about model releases and other paperwork. Marginal operators and inexperienced entrepreneurs – who often have the lowest prices – may skimp on such detail, which can saddle you with unexpected costs long afterward. Unless you can obtain a copy of the release, you don’t really know that it exists or what it says. Juries can take models’ rights very seriously. Consider, for example, the $15.6 million judgment against Nestle for misusing a model’s image.

Managing Rights for Brand Protection

The best way to obtain a memorable and unique picture is to assign a good photographer to shoot custom work. But often your branding requirements must be traded off against other constraints, such as staying within a budget and meeting a deadline. Stock photos have always played a role in striking the right balance.

But where RF stock is anonymously and promiscuously available, rights-managed stock is carefully and selectively licensed. Rights-managed stock offers a middle ground between the expense of commissioning a special shoot and the cost of brand erosion if the product’s signature image appears in an related context. It is less costly to a photo buyer because the photographer expects to spread the cost of creating the image across several separate licenses over the lifetime of the image. At the same time, it protects the buyer from conflicts by keeping a clean market separation between the images uses.

This is why a license is customarily phrase in terms of a particular set of rights and guarantees granted to the buyer. As you would expect, this careful definition of rights serves to protect the photographer’s revenue. But it also is a valuable protection for the buyer. It is the mechanism by which the photographer knows what each image usage has been and will be, so that potential conflicts can be avoided. The various forms of exclusivity in the rights license (by length of time, geographic territory, display medium, etc.) are time-proven techniques for eliminating the market overlap that leads to brand confusion.

Striking the Balance.

One of the advantages claimed for the RF business model is that marketing plans often change at the last minute, and RF requires no bargaining for additional rights. But it is easy enough to avoid reopening negotiations when using rights-managed stock too. How? Raise the issue of additional used during initial discussions. A photo buyer who’s been around the block can usually anticipate the normal contingencies and most of the photographers and agents will be happy to nail down the prices and terms for various options at the outset.

In fact, both the photographer and the buyer will benefit by setting up a package deal with predefined alternatives. In particular, the photographer can take proactive steps to keep the buyer’s options open for the full range of marketing scenarios. The buyer can present a full range of alternatives to the client, complete with budget numbers. And, with everything wrapped up in one bargain, both parties can relax and go about their core business.

http://www.asmp.org/commerce/royaltyfree.php