Standards designed to make our jobs easier, allowing us to avoid misunderstandings, reduce liability, save resources, and concentrate on what really matters — producing and delivering great work for our clients.

I manage print production for an ongoing stream of projects, for multiple clients at our agency. For each account, we receive numerous estimates and invoices from dozens of suppliers — photographers, illustrators, reps and stock agencies. I receive thousands of images every year, many with usage restrictions. These restrictions vary from client to client, supplier to supplier, job to job and even image to image. We license a mix of assignment and stock, rights-managed, royalty-free, subscription and other types of licenses. We also use images owned by our agency or our clients.

With the large volume of projects and images we produce, and with all of the different types of licenses involved, identifying and confirming the particular license associated with any particular image can consume both time and resources. In our fast-paced workflow, we can afford to waste neither. We always need it “yesterday.”

Once we identify the correct license, there are often conflicting descriptions on estimates, invoices, job change orders, purchase orders and other documents, both paper and digital. Even when rights information is stored in a digital asset management system, this requires us to manually key in that information, and leaves us liable for any inadvertent errors or misinterpretations.

To make matters worse, no two suppliers use the same terminology when describing licenses, and every supplier has its own understanding of the meaning of the terms it uses. Their understanding may differ from ours. All of these issues unnecessarily complicate the estimating and licensing process.

We are obligated to ensure that our clients pay a reasonable price for the rights received. Our clients typically require us to obtain multiple estimates from a selection of suppliers. Subtle differences in a license description on an estimate can have a very significant effect on the rights granted, and by extension, on the value our clients receive. As a result, there is frequently extra work involved in cross checking and comparing the rights described on all of the estimates received for a project. I need the rights descriptions on each estimate from each supplier to match precisely, using terms that allow my supplier, my agency and my client to understand precisely what usage is allowed, and what usage is not included.

A similar issue occurs when we need to license a stock image.It seems every stock web site uses a different licensing menu structure and different license packages. Their menus and packages have different names, and the contents of each differ as well. This requires us to literally hunt and peck on each site to find the rights we need. Big waste of time. Why do stock agencies insist upon torturing their customers like this? The stock agencies should compete on image quality, pricing, customer service and keyword searches. All of them should use the same menus for selecting rights. For that matter, assignment and stock photographers and illustrators should also adopt the same standardized rights menu structure. This would allow us to easily license the rights we need from any supplier.

For those few suppliers who embed usage information in images, this “metadata” is often stored as a paragraph of text in a single rights field. This prevents us from easily capturing and using the information, and is of little value, given the quantities of images we deal with on a day-to-day basis. What we need, and what we intend to require in the near future, is for every supplier to use an industry-standard license format to describe the rights associated with each image delivered.

Rather than dumping a paragraph of run-on text into a single field, suppliers should clearly state and itemize each element of the license, placing each into a separate, standardized field, both on their estimates and invoices, and in metadata embedded in every image file delivered. We need a numbering system for rights, similar to the Pantone system, allowing us to order by number when requesting licenses from any assignment or stock image supplier, and allowing us to truly automate the management of image licenses. This will allow us to more easily avoid accidental overuse, and also allow us to re-license images on-time and more often!

In my experience, many artist reps, photographers, illustrators and stock agencies seem to think their only responsibility to us is delivering images. Not so. They have a responsibility to provide us with the information we need to effectively manage those images throughout the license, and they need to provide that information in a format that allows us to use it efficiently, without wasting resources.

As a print production manager, I am very glad to see that image suppliers are finally stepping up to the plate and accepting responsibility for their product by participating with in the PLUS Coalition. Together, we have created industry standards for image license terms, definitions, menus, packages, ID codes and a universal license format. These PLUS standards will solve virtually all the issues I’ve described above, and more.

Every print producer, art buyer, ad agency and advertiser stands to benefit tremendously from the PLUS standards, along with our suppliers and professionals in all other related industries. I encourage all to join and support the PLUS Coalition, and to learn and use the PLUS standards.

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