Image Isn't Everything

Ballon patiently steers the customer through the site, telling her where to enter image-reference numbers and find pricing information. "Okay," the customer says. "Then I have another number -- 600K72dpi? I'm not sure what to do with that."

"Those numbers probably refer to the file format that you want to use," Ballon explains -- which wins knowing looks from the other reps. "The '600K,' or 'kilobytes,' is the size of the image, and the '72dpi,' or 'dots per inch,' is the resolution of the image."

"Ohhh. Okay. Now, how can I tell whether we have already bought it or not?" After a few more clicks, Ballon guides the customer through an online purchasing history. The image has not been ordered, Ballon tells her.

"Um ... okay. Can I get these images mailed to me overnight?"

At this point, the reps erupt in giggles, almost drowning out Ballon's explanation that the images can be downloaded right now.

The group's critique is supportive and subtle. Margret Campbell, 33, a striking woman with black-and-mahogany hair that is topped by platinum-blond bangs, commends Ballon's pacing and approach. "You didn't talk down to her," Campbell says. "You didn't cut her off with an answer, even though the answer was immediately obvious."

This is how Getty Images is winning on the Web -- one call at a time, one download at a time. This call center in Seattle, one of 11 that the company operates, handles an average of 6,000 inbound calls a week from Canada, France, Sweden, the United States -- all around the world. The department has almost doubled in size during the past year, while its goals have become more and more ambitious: It aims to answer 93% of all incoming calls within one minute.

"One of the biggest messages we had to deliver to people was that moving to a digital-business model was about high-tech and high-touch," Hallberg says. "We had to integrate the people side of our business -- the account relationship and the knowledge that we have in our sales staff and our research staff -- and we had to translate that knowledge to the Web team. At the same time, we had to get our sales reps and our service reps to understand that their jobs weren't going to disappear."

The New Logic of Web Value

One day in September 1996, Mark Getty got a call in his London office. A sales rep at Tony Stone had just sold an image for the largest asking price in the history of the company up to that point -- 39,670 pounds ($63,000 USD). Wouldn't Getty like to go downstairs to the sales floor to congratulate the account executive who conducted the sale? he was asked. Certainly, he replied. As Getty shook hands with the rep and gave her a celebratory bottle of champagne, he asked about the sale. How did she come up with her asking price? Well, she replied, she had asked for more at first, to which the customer had responded that he could get a photo from Stone's competitor for half of the price that she'd offered. "But our photo is twice as good," she countered. So the two sides negotiated the historic final price.

But Getty, thinking about the company's elaborate, 92-page pricing guide, pressed her again. Where did her original asking price come from? She shrugged. "I just thought it was a really good photo."

That transaction, as successful as it was, is also a legacy of a pricing system that is both enormously complex and strangely random -- and that has plagued the stock-photography industry since its inception. Every company starts with "list" prices based on obscure algorithms that take into account company size, volume of business, how a photo is used, and duration of exclusive rights. But reps routinely discount or increase prices based on what it takes to close a deal.

Getty and his colleagues realized that if one of the basic promises of the Web is simplicity -- of selection, of acquisition, and of service -- then they would have to drastically simplify their pricing process as well. So Getty handed down an ultimatum. Forget 92-page pricing guides. The new pricing guide would be one page. That one-page solution became a slick digital form on the gettyone Web site, where customers answer 12 questions and get back a price instantly. What's more, once a customer purchases a photo online, gettyone's Web site immediately updates that photo's licensing rights in the company's database so that the image is no longer available to other customers.

By letting the logic of the Web guide its business, Getty Images has found new ways to add value to its products. In its digital lab in Seattle, windows are covered with black cloth to block out sunlight, and a string of Christmas lights serves as desk illumination in darkened rooms. In three adjoining rooms, thousands of images are scanned, color-corrected, digitally retouched, and readied for Web distribution. Two shifts of technicians digitally scan an average of 750 photos every 12 hours. A team of artists retouches those scans -- erasing bits of dust, eliminating flaws, and adjusting color balance.