I recently came across an article in the Harvard Business Review that made a great case for the need for well managed corporate archives. I found it interesting because it was an excellent riposte to those business leaders who still hold the attitude – “I’m focused on the future; why do I need to look back into the past?”.
One of the main examples the article uses focuses on how Kraft Foods managed its integration of Cadbury in 2010. This was quite a prickly issue, with resistance from Cadbury’s management and employees fearing the loss of their values. Observers started to predict that the integration would fail, but then the situation was somewhat rescued when Kraft turned to its archives and launched an intranet site that celebrated the parallels between the two companies. Using the archives, they had found a lot of evidence of shared values and then backed it up with timelines, old advert images and videos. By looking at history, and not just driving forward blindly, they’d found a solution.
This is just one example that demonstrates the importance of preserving your historical assets, making them easy to retrieve and share should they be needed for any purpose in the future. But how many companies, particularly with the explosion of new data-heavy videos that companies are creating now, will be able to do this effectively in the future?
At Imagen, we’re well aware of this issue and have all the right solutions in place within our platform to help organisations ensure that they can archive all their digital media assets (including documents, images and video) easily. We also help businesses keep their valuable content secure, which is particularly useful when you have video that may relate to internal investigations, high-security locations, be relied on for compliance or other similar issues. On top of that, we provide as much cloud-based capacity to store video as you need, ensure that you can search and retrieve the assets easily, and give you the means to distribute the content quickly around the globe.
Make no mistake, the issue of managing video archives (plus the large volume of video that’s being produced at present) is only going to get bigger. It’s said that online video already accounts for three-quarters of all online traffic; video produced by enterprises, featuring both current and historical footage is playing a big part in that. What you don’t want is your growing bank of content to become disparate and scattered all over the company, be hard to find, or be indifferent and unusable formats.
Ultimately, what we should all recognise is that historic content can often have just as much ‘brand power’ as new content. It’s a key way of reinforcing your brand’s identity, values and heritage and is particularly useful in times of change when those values need reinforcing the most. Being able to give people access to this content more easily will always help you to strengthen your position.
To find out more, simply request a demo of the Imagen platform or get in touch. We also recommend this paper on building your business case for a media management platform, which gives you many more reasons to consider a better and more efficient way of managing all your media assets.