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An Interview with Chris Ferrone
Interviewed by Geetesh Bajaj, November 26th 2004
Chris Ferrone (pictured to the left), Managing Partner
of Matton Images
LLC, a complete royalty free resource, has worked in the stock
photo industry since 1987. He has served as Vice President of Index
Stock Imagery's International Sales Division as well as managed
their domestic sales office in Los Angeles. Chris is also President
of Retrofile.com which licenses rights-managed and royalty free
vintage stock imagery world-wide through a variety of agents and
other distribution channels. He is also currently the President
of the North American stock photo industry trade association, the
Picture Archive Council of America.
Geetesh:
Chris:
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Tell us more about yourself and Matton.
Matton is a one-stop shop for creatives in need of royalty
free artwork.
The whole idea behind Matton.com - how we designed the site,
how we market our products and service, how we approach our
clients - is "simplicity."
We want to make the art director's life easier. We have accomplished
this by making the widest variety of high-quality royalty
free photos, illustrations, footage, clipart, graphics, maps
and music available on an easy-to-use search engine. Our website
has a no-frills design and a no-nonsense functionality that
let art-directors and designers locate the creative elements
they need as quickly and efficiently as possible. As a veteran
of the stock photo industry - I started selling stock images
in 1987 - I have always tried to focus on the what the client
wants. It seems obvious enough, but it's amazing how many
people get it wrong. The client isn't interested in all the
bells and whistles a website has to offer. In fact, too many
options and too many flashing promos are a distraction from
their simple need to find the right image or element for their
project.
Matton.com reflects my personal belief that a good product,
when seen by the buyer, will sell itself. We have great products.
Our job is to let the buyers see them in the most convenient
way possible (for the client.) Our web-site accomplishes that
in a simple way that our clients find refreshing.
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Geetesh:
Chris:
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Could you tell us more about "royalty free" and use of clip media content in PowerPoint.
Used properly, images can make a PowerPoint presentation
come alive for the audience in a way that's nearly impossible
to achieve with text alone.
From a cost perspective, royalty free artwork makes the most
sense for use in PowerPoint. From a practical perspective,
one can find a royalty free image to illustrate just about
any "point" one needs to make. Royalty free and
PowerPoint were made for each other.
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Geetesh:
Chris:
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Most of the royalty free photography content that Matton provides
is high resolution and somewhat more expensive than what people
would pay for just using in a PowerPoint slide. What are your
thoughts?
In fact, the photography on Matton.com comes not only in
high resolution files, but in medium and low resolution files
as well which are priced accordingly.
For the quality of imagery available on Matton.com, the prices
for the low res. versions of the images are more than fair
for PowerPoint usage. Creatives recognize these images are
the work of their fellow creatives - photographers and illustrators.
Clients wishing to present themselves in a professional manner,
are willing to pay the appropriate fees for professional quality
imagery. For truly low-budget projects, we have CDs with hundreds
of royalty free pictures at extremely reasonable prices.
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Geetesh:
Chris:
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How significant is the use of visuals in presentations.
To repeat my earlier comment, used properly, images can make
a PowerPoint presentation come alive for the audience in a
way that's nearly impossible to achieve with text alone. Background
images will bring text and numbers to life.
For example, show a slide with a chart about the aging of
the baby-boomer generation and everyone will see the numbers
and the trend shown by the chart. Follow that chart with a
great photo of a baby-boomer couple enjoying a drive in their
convertible car and your chart then relates to reality for
the audience and the message behind the chart is that much
stronger. You can apply this concept to just about any point
one might want to make in a live presentation. The significance
of visuals can not be overstated.
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Geetesh:
Chris:
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Can you share some trivia about an unconventional use of royalty
free or just something interesting.
No odd examples of royalty free image use come immediately
to mind. I do know of a great "book" about PowerPoint
written by a gentleman named Seth Godin that might interest
readers of this interview. It's titled "Really Bad PowerPoint
(and how to avoid it)". I put "book" in quotation
marks because it's only available as a virtual publication
which one can purchase and download directly from Amazon.com.
It's quite inexpensive - US$1.99 - and well worth the two
bucks for any regular user of PowerPoint.
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