“We had a bad day when Dolly was cloned,” says Denise
Waggoner, vice president of creative research at Getty. “We hadn’t been
studying biotechnology, and suddenly everyone wanted a shot of 25 sheep
on a seamless white background. So now we try to keep our toes dipped
in the water in lots of different fields, so we can be ready.”

And the fact that the list of most popular search terms for 2006, 2007 and the first half of 2008 all include: business, people, and woman. (Woman climbed from eighth to fifth to first).

As a rule of thumb, the lifespan of an image depicting contemporary
fashions and technology is roughly four years. “That’s the maximum
shelf life for, say, a woman walking down the street talking on a cell
phone,” says Waggoner. “After that, she’s retro.”  unless of course she
is the Everywhere Girl!

Lee’s post brought back to mind the fact that one of the most used feature in our image monitoring service is the tear sheet feature. This is a feature that shows you where your image has been used in a print publication or website. Everyone loves the feature. I guess a few years ago publishers used to send out tear sheets and now they don’t – or at least they don’t frequently and consistantly.

Another sighting of the Everywhere Girl on a drug prevention website. You will need to scroll down on the page to see a download notice for this flyer.

If you know about Idée, you also know that we have soft launched an image monitoring service. This service allows clients to find out where their images have been used in print as well as on the Internet. Our proprietary image recognition technology is the foundation technology used to build this service. You can learn more about how the technology works by viewing this little video.

For most of our clients image monitoring is a very manual process involving manually flipping through publications to locate their image credits or using Google searches to find online image usages. Now what’s fascinating – besides image monitoring! – are the image usages we find. One particular example is the Everywhere Girl.  John Batlelle’s post about image search reminded of my ever lingering Everywhere Girl post. What if when you see an image you were able to search for all the places it has appeared?

The first time I heard about Everywhere Girl was from Andy’s blog over at StockPhotoTalk. Andy posted about the Everywhere Girl and upon reading his blog post I thought that hey, wait a minute, since we can identify instances of our client photos both online and in print, would it not be great if I found out where the Everywhere Girl was appearing? And there, my Everywhere Girl fascination started. So first here is what I found out about the Everywhere Girl:

• She actually exists: ie she is a person who lives in the US
• She has been around for quite some time
• Her identity was unknown until recently (I think last year)
• She is a model and indeed has started appearing everywhere from Dell advertisements to financial services advertisements to Church websites, and even our own Canadian government has used her photograph on their website!

The Everywhere Girl is Jennifer Chandra (Hello Jennifer!), her photograph was taken by Doug Menuez many years ago and his image of Jennifer Chandra has been licensed as a royalty free image. In this post Jennifer talks about finding out she is the Everywhere Girl.

So for our little image monitoring exercise I licensed the Everywhere Girl image and started using our image monitoring service to see where it showed up. You will find sample findings below. I will continue updating this post with new findings.

I find the story of the Everywhere Girl fascinating. I have always wondered what makes a photo representative of a group, idea, population or? I mean given the millions of images available for licensing why this photo and not another one? Is this a key cultural indicator? Is there an Everywhere boy? An Everywhere dog or cat? It sure would be great to find out!

Oh and if you are curious as to how Everywhere Girl looks today, visit Flickr! oh and one last Paul Hales from the Inquirer also has a very nice collection of Everywhere Girl appearances. And Brian does too.

I am looking for the Everywhere dog… Help me if you have seen him!

New Tribes Bible Institute

Greyhound Canada: I made a little collage of this as the webpage was too wide

Corporate Communications

Silluvan University

Canada Revenue: Child and Family Services

Student Ministries

Air Conditioning Specialists

Gielle : Electronic system for safety

ESL classes in Japan

Update: The Everywhere Girl is also on the cover of a lot of books. See for yourself here.