“We have some content we want to send over, but we need to go through it first and work out what to keep.”
You’d be surprised how often we hear that from clients. Especially ad agencies and production houses, who are always dealing with multiple projects.
Research shows creatives want to keep their content. But deadlines loom and there’s never time to go through the hard drives stacked in a cupboard at the back of the office. Meanwhile, the stash gets bigger and bigger. The task gets more and more overwhelming. Until one fateful day you need to do something about it. You pick up the first drive and it doesn’t even have a label…
I don’t have time for this.
Sound familiar? In our experience, at least 7 out of 10 agencies and production houses face this exact issue. So you’re not alone.
And the good news is, someone else can handle it for you. Us.
Here’s how Preferred Media manage a Content Cleanup
One of our agency clients was doing an office cleanup recently. As usual, the whole team was flat out on client projects. No one had the time to review six archive boxes full of hard drives. So we did it for them.
We received, inspected and catalogued 127 hard drives, plus a small number of older format materials.
There were 2 hard drives which had failed completely. There was nothing we could do to recover that content.
11 hard drives held duplicate content (that had already been archived with us).
We created a master list of all the remaining content, sorted by agency client and the specific project. Where possible, we also distinguished masters, project files and camera rushes.
Then we sent the master list back to the agency. A few clients needed to be switched from current to past, or vice versa. Once that was done, we applied all the agency’s rules, which were very clear.
The agency didn’t want to store anything for ex-clients, so that was set aside. We’re now working with those ex-clients and their new agencies to determine what they want to do with the content.
They did want to store content for current clients, but had a clear policy around that too – masters and third party rushes. Since hard drive failure rates mean they’re a poor medium for long-term storage, we copied all the relevant content to LTO and stored that way. Restoration from LTO takes a little longer, but in this case the content was not time sensitive so that was not an issue.
What did all this mean for our agency client?
- They cleaned out their hard drive stash, without having to take time away from client-facing projects.
- They had their past content catalogued and securely stored on a robust LTO solution. Accessible if they ever needed it.
Over the course of the project, we also learned a lot more about how they store and manage all their content. That makes it easier for us to help effectively in the future. So their hard drives won’t pile up again.
We’ve also set up processes to stop the buildup of hard drives from happening again.
Have you got a stack of hard drives hidden in your office somewhere? A cleanup job you’d love to get to but never have time for.
Tidying up your content data needn’t be expensive or time-consuming. Just get in touch and let’s see if we can help.
