Category: Corbis
Seattle based Corbis Corporation is widely considered to be the worlds 2nd largest stock licensing company offering photography, film footage, and related rights. The company claims to have a collection of more than 100 million creative works including a broad collection of entertainment and historic images, footage, and a rights and clearances division. Corbis is privately owned by Bill Gates, who founded the company in 1989 under the name Interactive Home Systems (a name currently held by an unrelated, slightly older company based in Concord, Massachusetts). The company's name was changed to Continuum Productions in 1994 and to Corbis Corporation a year later. "Corbis" is a Latin word meaning "wicker basket," which at the time referred to the company's emerging view of itself as a receptacle or storehouse for visual media. As of 2007, the company employed 1,100 people in 24 offices located in 16 countries.
Key executives:
Bill Gates - Founder / Principal Owner
Gary Shenk - Chief Executive Officer
Sue McDonald - COO & CFO
Jim Mitchell - SVP & General Counsel
Brad Zumwalt - President, Veer
Corbis Turns On GreenLight For Music
Corbis has just launched GreenLight Music, the music industry’s first online sync licensing solution for popular music. Launching with the support of four major music companies, the new service offers a simple, one stop solution for creative and marketing professionals to secure usage rights to iconic music for a broad set of uses such as; websites, corporate videos, tradeshows, sales meetings, live meetings and stage productions. full story at PhotoArchiveNews.com
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Rights With GreenLight
GreenLight the media licensing, talent negotiation and rights representation consultancy service from Corbis has been selected to represent Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. GreenLight will manage advertising, promotion and merchandise for Legendary Civil Rights Activist and Leader, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Corbis Secures Latest Purchase - NMA Group
Corbis today announced it has purchased Norm Marshall & Associates (NMA Group) a world-leader in entertainment marketing and product placement.
“Corbis is committed to helping global brands break through the clutter of today’s advertising market by providing the industry’s first comprehensive and integrated approach to connect brands with global entertainment,” said Gary Shenk, chief executive officer of Corbis. “By combining NMA Group’s strengths in product placement and entertainment marketing with GreenLight’s expertise in celebrity and music clearances, we now offer unprecedented connectivity between global brands and the entertainment community.”
Stock People: Edie Tobias Senior VP Commercial Products - Corbis
Corbis Images have named Edie Tobias (photo) as Senior Vice President of Commercial Products.
Based in Los Angeles, Tobias will be responsible for leading the Commercial product group and growing the Corbis and Veer businesses globally. “Edie has both the deep knowledge and strategic vision to lead the next phase of Corbis’ Commercial offering,” said Gary Shenk, CEO of Corbis. “Her proven track record and market success in the visual content business will help evolve and expand our core competencies.”
Prior to her SVP position, Tobias served as Vice President of Media Products at the Company. Previous to this, she served as Vice President of Creative Content at Jupiterimages. She began her career at Sharpshooters Premium Stock Photography and Footage where she was President and joined Corbis as Director of Photography in 2000 after the acquisition of that company.
“I’m thrilled to become part of the senior management team as Corbis moves into this next phase of growth and expansion of services,” said Tobias. The entire Commercial Products team has worked extremely hard to prepare for this launch and I am honored to lead them.”
Corbis Releases New RF Service - ‘easily access and purchase’
Corbis has announced a new Royalty Free (RF) subscription service to allow customers to ‘easily access and purchase’ more than one million RF images. Called ‘OnDemand’ the new, flexible Royalty Free subscription service means customers can enter into an agreement based on the number of monthly downloads they require, desired length of contract and whether web resolution or both web and high-resolution images are purchased. Following confirmation of their subscription, customers will be able to access and purchase images from across the RF range, including premium content and Fancy, a versatile and highly art-directed collection. Take a look here: OnDemand
Corbis And AP Work Together
The Associated Press and Corbis Images have announced a comprehensive cross-distribution partnership today that provides customers access to more than 10 million images covering breaking news, sports and entertainment, archival and creative images.
Corbis Creative Research = “Mass Intelligence”
Photo agency Corbis Images have released a new Creative Research report which anticipates the emerging cultural trends that will drive image usage. The report titled “Mass Intelligence” highlights our increasing quest for knowledge in a world where science and information hold the key to a brighter future. To accompany its periodical report, Corbis also unveiled a selection of nearly 1,500 images on CorbisImages.com that illustrate how a greater emphasis on intelligence is changing the world around us.
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Web-site make-over and new collections at Corbis
Corbis has launched a new version of its web-site with a myriad set of new features designed to simplify searching for images among the company’s wide variety of collections. Pablo Supkay, Director of Web Platforms, says Corbis the changes to the site resulted from an in-house overhaul of the design and functionality of the site aimed at reducing clutter, and an exhaustive testing process with customer focus groups from among clients world-wide. The over-riding goal of the redesign is to make searching through Corbis’s wide variety of collections more intuitive.
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Corbis launches stock footage site
Corbis, a leading stock licensing company, has announced that it has launched a new motion site in order to license stock footage online. The site features tens of thousands of high definition(HD), rights managed (RM) and royalty free(RF) clips and also includes clips from Paramount Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc., National Geographic, Sony Pictures Entertainment, HBO Archives and the Smithsonian Channel, via a recent partnership with Denver-based Thought Equity Motion. “The new Corbis Motion provides customers with a fast, convenient search and a smooth, simple purchasing and delivery experience,” said Doug Segers, Director, Corbis Motion. “We have outstanding HD, RM and RF collections that can serve all types of creative needs from film and television to new media.”
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Corbis partners with ihaveanidea.org to sponsor Portfolio Night 7
Corbis, widely believed to be the world’s 2nd largest stock licensing company, has announced that it has partnered with, ihaveanidea.org support Portfolio Night 7, the largest simultaneous advertising portfolio review ever held, featuring a uniquely designed review process in a “speed-dating setting”. Students enrolled in advertising programs, recent graduates, and young creatives will benefit from valuable face-to-face time with three or more world-class creatives during the event. “Portfolio Night is the only global event of its kind aimed at identifying and cultivating aspiring designers and providing them with a fun environment to present their work and connect with industry leaders,” said Ivan Purdie, Senior Vice President, Sales & Service, Corbis. “Despite the tough economic climate, Corbis is proud to continue to partner with ihaveanidea on this valuable event to nurture the next generation of creatives.”
FeaturesNews
Corbis closing SnapVillage offering micro-stock under Veer brand
Corbis has announced that it has decided to do away with SnapVillage by the end of this year and move its micro-stock offering onto Veer.com under the name Veer Marketplace. That the company has decided to shut down the seemingly ill-fated SnapVillage comes as no surprise. By all appearances, the site has made no dent in the micro-stock sector, where Getty’s more dynamic iStockphoto dominates and several other brands – Dreamstime, Fotolia, and Shutterstock – are the presumed runners up.
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Corbis partners with Thought Equity Motion
Corbis, a leading stock licensing company, has announced a partnership with Denver based Thought Equity Motion, a leading stock footage licensing company. According to the terms of the new agreement the two companies will cross-distribute their footage collections, giving Corbis a much larger footage offering to distribute including content from Paramount Pictures, MGM, NBC News, HBO, National Geographic, Sony Pictures, the NCAA and many other notable collections represented by Thought Equity Motion.
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POLFOTO becomes exclusive representative of Corbis RM collection in Denmark
Corbis, widely believed to be the world’s 2nd largest stock licensing company, has announced that it has signed an agreement with POLFOTO, one of Denmark’s largest photo agencies, to exclusively represent Corbis’ rights managed (RM) stock photography collection in Denmark. “We are honored to work with Corbis with this new agreement,” says managing director Kirsten Anker Sørensen. “Our partnership with Corbis will provide Danish media, designers, publishers and advertising agencies with access to world-class collections.”
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Corbis layoff reaches more than 15 percent of staff
Corbis, widely believed to be the world’s 2nd largest stock licensing company, is cutting slightly more than 15% of its global headcount of 1075 in an effort to further streamline the business. This round of cuts follows a similar lay-off last November which included 125 employees in order to downsize its customer service operations, and may be the result of redundancies created from the acquisition of Veer last year. According to Dan Perlet the Director of Communications at Corbis, the company has let approximately 50-75 employees go this week, including senior executives, and has notified the other employees whose jobs are being cut in the coming year. Perlet explained “We believe that restructuring our personnel gives us a better position to gain market-share in a competitive marketplace”.
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Corbis taps photographer Jason Joyce to create stylized women in sports images
Corbis, one of the world’s largest stock licensing companies, has released a new set of imagery featuring futuristic women in sports just in time for the Summer Olympic games in Beijing. To create these images Corbis Art Director Martin Yates worked with acclaimed photographer Jason Joyce to produce imagery of women fencers, swimmers, archers, weight-lifters, soccer players and others in high concept futuristic settings. The images have been carefully retouched to give the photos a clean, vibrant and surreal look.
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Open Text’s Artesia Digital Media Group acquires eMotion from Corbis for $5 million
Waterloo, Ontario based Open Text Corporation, has agreed to acquire eMotion LLC from the Corbis Corporation for approximately $5 million in cash and assets. Open Text has stated plans to merge eMotion with its Artesia Digital Media Group in order to expand its enterprise marketing asset management solution, Artesia DAM. Corbis first acquired eMotion in 2005 in an apparent attempt to compete with to Getty’s Media Management Services. “eMotion is the right fit at the right time to expand our Artesia Digital Media Group, our portfolio of solutions for marketing departments, and our team of content experts who can innovate with customers and leverage their growing libraries of video, images and other rich media content in a Web 2.0 world,” said Scott Bowen, President of Open Text’s Artesia Digital Media Group.
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Corbis launches virtual Museum of Art for the Arts
Corbis, a leading stock licensing company, has launched an online initiative called the Museum of Art for the Arts (MofAA). The MofAA is a virtual museum fictitiously based in New York City housing 250 landmark works of art plus thousands of images from Corbis. The MofAA is the brainchild of FWIS, the New York City graphic design firm also responsible for the popular DIY pinhole camera campaign. “Corbis’ collection is astoundingly deep and broad, and the images contained within it have profound impact on our culture – creative or otherwise,” said Christopher Papasadero, Creative Director, FWIS “The MofAA highlights this imagery as a modern museum should - through well-curated exhibitions and public participation, on display.”
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Corbis re-brands its rights services unit as GreenLight Right Services
Corbis announced that it has renamed its Rights Services division with the more up-beat sounding “GreenLight.” The new brand name for the division which assists clients to clear rights to celebrity likenesses, feature film and TV clips, music, trademarks, for use in advertising, comes with the addition of a new business activity, that of Talent Negotiation. Under the GreenLight brand, Corbis will now also help marketers to broker endorsement deals with sports, film, television, music and other celebrities for new product launches as well as for advertising and marketing campaigns.
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Photo News Round-Up
• In an op-ed piece published in the New York Times on May 20th Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford University explains the deficiencies of the new Orphan Works bill currently on the table.
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Photo News Round-Up
• 123rf.com has launched a new service for corporate customers allowing them to create a customized stock photo intranet site under their own banner while 123RF supplies the images. Corporate clients can then administrate the intranet, giving access to downloads and other privileges to appropriate staff members. Click here for more information.
