Getty Images Research Articles

From cost reduction to revenue growth: Shifting priorities for digital asset management

A fundamental shift and a new priority is starting to emerge for digital asset management (DAM). In the area of business benefits for DAM, a strong emphasis has been placed on cost reductions, such as the reduced amount of time finding content; lowered costs for express mail, shipping, and couriers; a replacement of manual systems with automated workflows; eliminating the need for CD-ROM or paper distribution of content and market messaging, etc. These cost savings can now be considered traditional, or canonical cost reduction methodologies for DAM. Indeed they are extremely important reasons for many organizations to build, deploy, maintain, and enhance a DAM infrastructure. As a result, most ROI models for DAM are based on combinations of cost reductions and productivity gains. However, after all of the cost reduction focus in recent years, attention is turning to new methods of leveraging DAM to generate new streams of revenue and profit. There is a particularly strong interest in content monetization where revenues derived from digital assets, or systems that deliver and track them, can grow rapidly with only a modest cost basis. Beyond conceptual interest, there are now a number of commercial systems rapidly validating this new direction including revenue generating content models from Apple Computer (iTunes Music Store), Adobe (Digital Media Store), Getty Images, CNBC Business Video, National Geographic Images, and many others.

Up and running

Going into schools to educate schoolchildren may be a small step in changing their habits and attitudes towards health. Asela Dharmadasa and Laura Wilkins explain what you can do GETTY IMAGES From sex education to basic life support, medical students are becoming increasingly involved in educating schoolchildren about health. These are two of the more well established initiatives around the country, but as medical schools expand, there may be scope for other student led initiatives, perhaps relating to drugs and alcohol, bullying, and nutrition. We explore the steps required to convert a good idea into a viable project and look at different approaches to teaching children of all ages. Although in recent years the national curriculum has been honed down, to relieve some of the pressure on teachers, health education still forms a compulsory part; most is taught within dedicated personal, social, and health education sessions and the rest within the remit of other subject areas. A well thought out project, with a realistic view of the needs of a school, has the potential to benefit everyone involved, including the pupils, teachers, and medical student volunteers. So you have an idea for a project that you want to set up in a local school. This could be related to existing projects around the country or something altogether new. What are the steps needed to convert this idea into reality (box 1)? ### Box 1: Setting up a project in a schoolRETURN TO TEXT

Building the World’s Visual Language: The Increasing Global Importance of Image Banks in Corporate Media

Many of the images we now find in magazines, news, promotional material and advertisements are bought cheaply from image banks like Getty Images, which can be accessed by people all around the world. These images are technically of high quality. They have bright lighting and flat colours; attractive models are highly posed and are set in non-descript locations to make them usable across the world. They do not represent actual places or events and they do not document or bear witness, but they symbolically represent marketable concepts and moods such as ‘contentment’ and ‘freedom’. The world in magazines and other similar media therefore comes to resemble the limited world of the image bank categories, which are based on marketing categories. This is therefore an ideologically pre-structured world which is in harmony with consumerism.

Getty Images puts e‐HR in perspective

Getty Images believes that the Internet is the only way to reach a worldwide, disparate and multilingual employee group. Information technology is beginning to enable the company to deliver state‐of‐the‐art HR services. The company is a market leader in providing visual content primarily for the design, media and photographic industries. It is a Web‐enabled e‐commerce business in the world’s top 20, with 2,600 staff and a vision to be “the essential source of imagery and related products and services online”.

Digital images in libraries: an overview

Image collections of various types are maintained by organisations of all sizes, in all sectors. The term ‘picture library’ is commonly used to refer to a commercial operation that sells access to a large archive of photographic images: well‐known examples are Getty Images and Corbis. Collections that are smaller in size but equivalent in function are to be found in private‐ and public‐sector institutions everywhere. These collections may be further categorised on the basis of: