During his keynote speech at the Dublin gathering of CEPIC, Stockbyte founder Jerry Kennelly announced the upcoming launch of his new business
Tweak. Operating on a content-as-a-service model, Tweak aims to become a major global self-service design library and change the way customers access creative content.
Instead of licensing components, Kennelly hopes that Tweak will offer a complete solution—not only to creatives, but also to marketers and small-business owners who seek do-it-yourself tools.
Getty Images acquired Kenelly’s Stockbyte and Stockdisc for $135 million in 2006. Tweak’s team of 30 includes many of the former company’s managers.
“Royalty-free stock photography allowed greater choice, speed and value, but to be honest, the design, copywriting, prepress and proofing process are still the big bottlenecks‚” Kennelly said. Tweak aims to rectify this, offering site users a library of full advertising and marketing collateral designs—with photography, typography and copy—across hundreds of business types, along with the ability to modify the pieces online and download high-resolution press-ready PDFs or Adobe InDesign files.
And the stock-image industry? “This is a unique opportunity for image distributors to get in on the ground floor with a development which will change the way people access high quality design forever,” explains Kennelly, who views Tweak as offering image owners a completely new revenue stream.
In addition to pre-packaged design layouts populated with professionally written text, each downloadable template comes with optional image and font packs. The Tweak platform plugs straight into third-party distributors’ Web sites and does not require any technological investment. The company is actively seeking such “tweaking partners.”
After three years of research and development, Kennelly’s team plans to fully launch Tweak in August. The company intends to offer a million templates by 2011.
(Video of Kennelly’s CEPIC keynote is available online.)