Whenever a creative is handed a brief for a new project or sits down to work on an idea for the first time, they often become paralyzed by the white screen or blank piece of paper. To overcome this problem, one of the first things we do as creatives is turn to the web and begin searching for sources of inspiration. We realized it would be awesome if Getty Images created a tool that creatives could use to assemble a virtual moodboard.

To accomplish this we designed a Flash interface that allows a user to set their desired mood through a series of sliders. As the user determines the degree of happiness and seriousness they are looking for, the backend pulls together the appropriate assets. Once the settings are finalized, the application delivers a steady stream of video and images set to short pieces of music.

After conquering the technical challenge of seamlessly streaming video, audio, and imagery, we thought we’d take it one step further and let users assemble their own stream. As the moodstream unfolds, users can click on individual assets and add them to their board. Once assembled, they can play their moodboard as a full screen stream, save it for future viewing or bounce over to Getty Images and Pump Audio to license the content in their moodboard.

Getty Images had long been known as the go to resource for beautiful, still imagery for print advertising. But as more marketing initiatives shifted towards online, Getty Images found that they were often being overlooked as creatives felt they were too expensive and did not have web ready assets. Instead of utilizing Getty Images, digital creatives were sourcing their content from microstock providers and UGC sites like Flickr. While they may have been the less expensive option, these creatives were missing out on quality images and were unaware that Getty also offered video and audio assets through Pump Audio.

The challenge for this project was to reach out to the audience of digital creatives and make them aware of Getty’s $49 image offerings, their extensive library of video and audio assets through Pump Audio. The added twist is that as a member of this very specific target, we were all too aware that they are very skeptical all marketing. They can smell a phony campaign from a mile away and are not interested in being sold to. So instead of selling them something we decided to give them something for free, something they would actually want to use.

Whenever a creative is handed a brief for a new project or sits down to work on an idea for the first time, they often become paralyzed by the white screen or blank piece of paper. To overcome this problem, one of the first things we do as creatives is turn to the web and begin to conduct searches for sources of inspiration. This can be a frustrating process as you need to play around with the keywords you enter in order to find assets that evoke the mood you are trying to hit. We realized it would be awesome if Getty created a tool that creatives could use as a source for inspiration allowing them to bypass the web search.
To accomplish this we designed a Flash interface that allows a user to set their mood through the use of sliders. As the user determines the degree of happiness and seriousness they are looking for the, the backend pulls together the appropriate assets that will be returned. Once the settings are determined the application delivers a steady stream of video and images set to short pieces of music.

After conquering the technical challenge of seamlessly streaming video, audio, and imagery, we thought we’d take it one step further and let users assemble their own stream. As the user watches the moodstream created by adjusting the settings, they can click on individual assets and add them to their moodboard. Once assembled, they can play their moodboard as a full screen stream, save their it for future viewing or bounce over to Getty Images and Pump Audio to license the assets in their moodboard.

Moodtream was unveiled at the 2008 Webby Awards and was quickly picked up by bloggers and top advertising publications like Creativity. When bloggers wrote about Moodstream it was as if they had been handed the brief for the project, clearly stating the functionality and how it can be used as an inspirational tool. One individual was such a fanatic that he wrote a poem about Moodstream.

The 4th week after Moodstream launched there were 132,000 Google search results for Moodstream + Getty Images. In those 4 weeks, over 147,000 people had visited Moodstream across the 8 different localized sites. Not too shabby.

We enjoyed working with the entire Getty team on this project and based on the following quote from our client it sounds like they share the love: