Creative Commons
There are quite a few sites where your creative director can download some copyright free images these days
but most of them rely on travel pics or goofy (and generally unprofessional ) shots of the office staff.
Now though there is a place for those of us who are on a tight budget but need quality work, or have quality work and need to find a market for it.
Check out Creative Commons.
There are places where you can publish your videos and get them seen by a broad audience.
As a marketing person who often needs to find images or audio that we can post for client approval before we buy, is site is a gold mine. We can set up the comps and get approval, and then know exactly what the rights are for each piece and what it’s going to cost us. Even better, a lot of the work is high quality and has a different look to it than those disks you buy art Office Cheapo.
The site links to major repositories as well, like the Public Library of Science, whose goal is to “a world in which the many thousands of scientific journals . . . are placed in an electronic library open to the public.”
And it links to the Media Rights website, which helps people find the research videos for their media campaigns, especially in human rights, as well as help “adult and youth filmmakers reach audiences, educators and librarians bring films into their curricula and nonprofits and activists integrate media into their campaigns.”
what could be a more awesome resource?