Las Vegas-based Blend Images has launched a product it calls Flex Packs, designed to simplify and offer more flexibility in licensing rights-managed imagery for commercial uses.
Blend offers seven Flex Packs: All Marketing Pack, Collateral Pack, Advertising Print/Product Pack, Advertising Indoor Display Pack, Advertising Outdoor Display Pack, Digital Pack (Mobile, Interactive, Web), and All Internal Use Pack. Each pack provides unlimited uses in a given territory, industry and time period.
The product appears very similar to the Getty Images’ rights-ready offering. Initially launched with the goal of simplifying rights-managed image licensing, the rights-ready model was discontinued earlier this year. At the time, Getty said it planned to deal with the process simplification issue through “improved flexible license packs,” which again sounds identical to the newly launched Blend product.
Just as with Getty’s rights-ready imagery, the degree of simplification offered by Blend’s Flex Packs is relatively minor compared to typical rights-managed image licensing. Seven choices need to be made to price one randomly selected image from the Blend collection under one of the Flex Packs, while the traditional rights-managed process requires making nine selections—adding image size and circulation under the Advertising Print Pack option.
[caption id="attachment_4605" align="alignleft" width="218" caption="Figure 1. Image priced under the Advertising Print Pack (click on image to enlarge)"]
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[caption id="attachment_4606" align="alignleft" width="205" caption="Figure 2. Single rights-managed image priced for print advertising circulation of 10,000,000 (click on image to enlarge)"]
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Another similarity to Getty’s discontinued product is that Flex Pack pricing becomes better for the buyer only in cases of very large uses. For example, the Advertising Print Pack makes sense for the buyer if the planned use is larger than a print ad using the image at a full page size in a print ad that will reach over 10 million readers—or if there are other, additional planned uses, such as using the same image on product packaging (see Fig. 1 and 2). Smaller uses remain more cost-effective under the traditional rights-managed process: if the circulation of the ad will be under 5,000 and all other criteria remain the same, this image can be licensed for roughly a quarter of the Flex Pack fee (just over $1,000 versus the price of $4,675 in Fig. 1).
Robert Henson, Blend director of channel relations and sales, said that aggregated use scenarios are the source of client demand for the new product: “Our Flex Pack options were created in response to the way our clients want to license imagery, and are specifically tailored to their commercial needs.”