Some companies’ ads see stock photos duplicated
November 30, 2006
The ad from Key Bank portrayed a heart-warming family moment: a dad pointing out something on his laptop to his smiling young daughter as she leans over his shoulder. In fact, the scene may have been a little too charming. The same image appears in a recent marketing brochure — from Bank of America.
Both banks say they bought the image from a photo agency that deals in stock pictures, not realizing the other was making the same selection. “We try not to use the same images as other competitors … if it happened, it happened,” says Joan Peloso, marketing services director for Cleveland-based KeyCorp, the bank-based financial services company.
Coincidences like that are happening frequently thanks to the proliferation of digital photo libraries that let marketers buy generic images at a fraction of the cost of original pictures. Advertisers often don’t buy exclusive rights, which are pricier, opening up the risk that others will use the same photos.
Nonexclusive rights to stock photos can cost as little as a $1, whereas the cost of arranging a photo shoot to produce an original picture can easily run into tens of thousands of dollars, given photographers’ fees ($1,000 to more than $10,000 a day), the cost of hiring a model and securing a location.
Stock images are particularly appealing to companies like banks, insurance companies and pharmaceutical firms that want to sell their products and services with broad, emotional imagery.
To convey an image of concern, both MetLife Inc. and Pfizer Inc.’s Viagra used the same image of a middle-aged man in a stripped button-down shirt resting his chin on his hands. And Bank of America and J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.’s Chase Student Loans sites both used the same image of a collegiate-looking boy working on his laptop for their Web sites.
“Companies are looking for a certain feeling, and they end up choosing the picture that other people like too,” says Thomas Kelly, spokesman for J.P. Morgan Chase.
While photo agencies often have millions of images to choose from, few may fit the specific criteria of marketers, particularly those that want to feature minorities. An image of a smiling Asian woman appears in a pamphlet from Washington Mutual Inc. and on Dell Inc.’s purchase help Web site. And a picture of an African-American couple sitting on a beige couch figuring out their finances appears in a marketing brochure for both Bank of America’s home-equity program and on Citigroup Inc.’s Citibank’s Web site.
Besides being embarrassing for advertisers, such duplications can make it difficult for consumers to tell brands apart.
“If we all look alike, it is hard for a customer to differentiate between their choices,” says Robbyn Tangney, a brand marketing executive with Bank of America Corp.
The companies involved in such mix-ups usually don’t know that their images are being used by other firms. And when they find out, if the campaign is a modest one, sometimes they don’t care.
“The risk of two people seeing the same image and connecting the dots is very, very low because the exposure of the campaign isn’t very, very great,” says Gary Shenk, senior vice president of images for Corbis Corp., a Seattle-based digital media agency that licenses stock photos.
Some photos are so narrow in appeal, or so firmly associated with a specific product, that there’s little chance of them being used by multiple marketers. “If a picture has a very specific product, like a Toyota car or an Apple iPod, it usually isn’t used again,” says David Norris, CEO of OnRequest Images.
Still, marketers understand that if they don’t pay the price for exclusive rights, they can’t guarantee a competitor won’t use the image. “Typically speaking, customers kind of go into this with their eyes open,” says Robert Gubas, vice president of marketing at Getty Images.
Buying exclusive rights to a stock photo isn’t necessarily cheaper than setting up a photo shoot. “To absolutely guarantee beyond any kind of a doubt” that no duplication would occur, marketers can pay in excess of six figures, says Mr. Gubas. Corbis, another major photo agency, says its price on a picture with some sort of exclusive rights costs from $250 to several thousand dollars, whereas pictures without rights range from $50 to $600.
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Marketers may be willing to pay these high prices to ensure one-time only pictures for ads in newspapers, magazines or billboards.
But they’re often willing to use general stock photography for Web marketing. MasterCard Inc., for instance, almost always uses original photography in its “Priceless” campaign which appears on television and print around the world, says Chris Jogis, vice president of U.S. brand development for MasterCard. It likes original images “to best capture the emotion” required for the ad, he says.
But online marketing generally doesn’t have such broad exposure and doesn’t merit the high costs. For its business Web site’s home page, MasterCard used an image of a man in a beige shirt holding his glasses to his mouth that also appears on the Web site for Bank of America’s Business Visa Card. “We don’t feel it is justified from a shareholder standpoint to get the exclusivity,” Mr. Jogis says.
Before the advent of digital technology, when pictures were typically stored as negatives, agencies kept tighter control over how images were used. They mostly licensed pictures with some degree of exclusivity: a marketer could use it in a certain geographic area at a certain time. That began to change when agencies began putting images onto CD-ROMs, making it easier — and more lucrative — for the same image to be distributed widely.
Making matters more complicated, small photo stock Web sites have sprung up, offering images from amateur photographers that can sell for as little as $1 a photo. One of the most prominent ones is iStockphoto, a wholly owned subsidiary of Getty Images.
Industry-standard technology to trace where a photo has been used is still in development.
“It is pretty much a crapshoot to try to determine whether the images have ever been used or will ever be used in the future,” says Jim Pickerell, editor of Selling Stock, a newsletter about stock photography issues, particularly marketing stock images.
Models typically have no say in such matters. They usually sign releases that grant their permission for using their photographs in any media for any purpose that’s not pornographic or defamatory.
Stock images are sold to any entity that wants to buy them. Newspapers sometimes run images from stock companies, and other businesses will use them for presentations. The Wall Street Journal occasionally uses stock photography in its “business of life” sections: Personal Journal, Pursuits and Weekend Journal.
As brands start to embrace new media campaigns and devote larger portions of their budget to the Web, industry executives expect companies to put more emphasis on exclusive pictures.
“People don’t always read an ad, but they can’t help but see the picture. They are getting impressions of the brand all the time,” says Halle Hutchison, head of brand and advertising at Deutsche Telekom AG’s T-Mobile USA. “It is just too dangerous, you never want to go two steps back on that.”
Marketers also are working with companies like OnRequest Images, whose clients include T-Mobile, Microsoft, Cingular and Starbucks, to create custom photo libraries that supply brand-specific images without the risk of duplication by a competitor.
Bank of America started building an image library this June and expects to gather about 4,000 images by the end of the year. KeyCorp also is in the process of developing its own photo collection.
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