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PHOTONONSTOP
October 19, 2001
Photononstop (formerly Groupe DIAF/SDP), a French company, has partnered with Envision in
New York to expand the marketing of their work into North America, and to market worldwide,
the work of the photographers represented by Envision. The new American operation will be
branded Envision Stock Photography, Inc, and is a Photononstop subsidiary.
We provided some information on this relationship in Story
433 , but since have received
additional facts that explain the scope of their plans in more detail.
Photononstop was created as a result of the merger of two French agencies DIAF and SDP.
They have a general non-specialized file. They currently have selling relationships with 30
different sub-agencies throughout Europe and in Australia, Japan and South America. With
the addition of Envision Stock Photography they have opened the door to marketing the work
of all their suppliers in the U.S.
Up to this time Envision had specialized in food, travel and nature, but now it will become
a general agency handling all types of subject matter.
Photononstop's new web site (www.photononstop.com)
has more than 90,000 images online. They
have rights to market 40,000 of those images in France, and worldwide rights to the other
50,000. The 50,000 will be available to U.S. customers in January 2002. Currently search is
only available in French, but the English version of the search engine will be available at
the time of the January 2002 launch.
In testing the site we found it to be very slow to bring up the home page and perform
searches, but Joachim Koutzky, President of the International Division of Photononstop,
says this is due to old server technology that will be replaced in early November.
Envision Stock Photography currently uses the 20/20 technology to display the 6,000 images
on their web site at
www.envision-stock.com . Koutzky indicates that the goal of
Photononstop is to have one central Internet platform and to have all suppliers using the
Photononstop software and interface. However, there is no final decision as to how
Photononstop will relate to the 20/20 technology. The 20/20 technology is widely used by a
number of small and medium sized stock agencies in the U.S.
Each selling sub-agent will operate independently in its market. Supplying agencies are
responsible for their own scanning and keywording. There is no general procedure of
keywording enforced by Photononstop.
Envision Stock Photography will be distributing all of Photononstop's print catalogs in the
U.S. Photononstop is paying the total costs of the production of these catalogs, the dupe
sets, and the postage for mailing the catalogs. This is an unusual situation since the
selling agency normally pays some of these costs. It is unclear whether other image
supplying agencies will be expected to front all these cost if they wish to distribute
their catalogs in the U.S. We also have no information on the percentage splits between the
selling and supplying agency.
Photononstop is seeking to represent the images and brands of other European agencies and
to give them an entre into the U.S. market.
Koutzky says that while these arrangements may be different from the usual
agency/sub-agency model they will be able to customize different models for different
agencies.
Photononstop is jointly managed by Christian Delannoy, Gilles Taquet and Joachim Koutzky.
The DIAF-SDP Group claims to have a stock file of approximately 2.5 million images aimed at
advertising clients, and to have had a turnover of about $4.6 million (U.S.) in 2000.
Sixteen percent of their sales came from the non-French market.