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In the next two years, you may be seeing fewer photos of those gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles that once glossed the pages of magazines, movies and billboards everywhere.
Instead, you will see images of hybrid cars -- those guilt-free, Jetson-like vehicles that may soon replace the sedan.
SUVs are out. Hybrid cars, cell phones, Vespas and little folding scooters are in.
Such trend-spotting may sound like fodder for psychics and fashion police, but it's also key intelligence for researchers at Getty Images (GETY), who analyze trends and fads to predict what images will sell to which markets in the next two years.
"How an image is used tells us why it sells," said Lewis Blackwell, senior vice president of creative direction for Getty Images.
Along with words and music, digital imagery is a gold mine of intellectual property, according to Getty Images CEO and co-founder Jonathan Klein.
"The Internet is absolutely perfect for very few businesses," Klein said. "It is perfect for the creation and distribution of intellectual property."
When Klein took Getty Images public in 1996, the word "Internet" did not even appear on its IPO documents. Today, close to 40 percent of Getty Images' sales are done on the Web.
With an archive of more than 70 million still images and approximately 30,000 hours of stock film, Getty Images is perhaps the largest corporation mining the vast landscape of visual content. The company has recast itself as an "e-commerce provider of imagery" that has helped revolutionize the industry.
What used to take seven weeks to select and get a photograph delivered now takes minutes to complete online. Now users can search, purchase and download an image in real time instead of sorting through bound catalogs and waiting for couriers to arrive.
Bill Gates' commercial digital imaging venture Corbis, Getty Images' main rival, holds the rights to more than 65 million images, 2.1 million of which are online.
While Corbis focuses largely on news and archival images, the vast majority of business for Getty Images is licensing stock photography to designers, advertising agencies, newspapers, movie production studios and corporations worldwide.
Getty Images selects images for its stock photography collection "based on what the market is wanting today and is likely to want tomorrow," Klein said.
To help brainstorm new ideas for imagery, researchers look at both demographics and visual trends in high-end advertising. They analyze sales data, website searches and client requests to find out what images are in demand and what are actually selling.
They then use this information to determine how a photograph needs to be shot, and whether it should be black and white or color, vertical or horizontal, blurred or focused.
Therefore, more than 100 images of the San Francisco skyline in Getty's online catalog aren't there by accident -- they're handpicked because they're capable of generating multiple sales worldwide.
"Every picture we put in our collection is targeted as a result of creative research," Klein said.
Based on research findings that suggest Baby Boomers are becoming more active and pet ownership is booming, Getty Images will capture images of active seniors or an entire CD of pet photographs.
But just as the Internet has made it easier to download images online, some worry that it has also facilitated the illegal use of those images.
Unlike the consumer market, where copyright infringement on books and music has been prevalent, the amount of abuse among Getty Images' business customers has been relatively low, Klein said.
In fact, the Web actually makes it easier to track images. With watermarks and encryption technology, the company can easily identify who is downloading an image.
"Policing the use of images in a digital environment is no more difficult (than in a non-digital environment)," Klein said.
But even Klein admits that Getty Images' creative research isn't perfect.
"It is subjective, it's not a science," Klein said. "But we try to make it as empirical as we can."
So while ad execs might praise Benneton's cutting-edge campaign to use nudity to sell clothes, the public might be slower to accept those images.
"What's shocking to us today is commonplace in a year's time," Klein said.
"Creative research is both fun and scary -- it's a bit like fortune-telling for our communication culture," Blackwell said. "The difference is that what we are seeing probably will come to pass."
