With the global value spent on advertising annually believed to be €386bn*, it is estimated that millions of Euros worth of TV commercials are at risk of being lost every year, due to outdated filing and maintenance by advertising agencies and production companies.
Despite the creative industry’s reputation for championing innovation and technology, in the field of storage, many brands and agencies are wasting valuable money and time due to lack of standardized, modern storage systems.
New, cloud-based, archive and sharing platform Cube launches this week, with the ambition of “Helping the industry to transform archiving for the 21st century”. The new platform provides massive storage space (from 500 Gigabytes to 10 Terabytes or more) and makes it possible for high quality TV commercials to be stored safely, as well as instantly shared in a variety of sizes and formats from QuickTime to broadcast-ready copy.
Cube inventor Diederik Veelo comments: “It’s incredible to think that brands and ad agencies are still relying on outdated storage, dusty cupboards and gentleman’s agreements with production companies to store their most valuable assets. If you’re in advertising or involved with a large brand, stop for a second and think about it: where are the master files of your latest campaign? Who’s responsible for keeping them safe? If you don’t know the answer to those questions it might be time to act.
“Brands are spending anything up to €21m on a single TV commercial** and then they are simply trusting them to third parties to look after. It’s like buying a Ferrari and then leaving it with the doors open and the keys in the ignition.”
The simple new subscription-based platform was developed by Veelo, a partner at The Ambassadors creative production company, due to his own need for a more modern, safe alternative to the options out there. Says Veelo: “Production companies are the guardians of millions of Euros worth of commercials and yet when awards season rolls round, or brands want to re-run a successful ad, it’s all too often a case of scrabbling round, trying to trace that lost master file.
“Cube takes away that hassle. It stores all the metadata associated with your advertising and it can instantly convert your high quality commercials to any format you need them in, including broadcast-ready formats that can be sent directly to TV stations without the need for a middle man. And, what’s more, you don’t need to be an expert in this field to use it. Someone with no prior knowledge of the industry can fully get to grips with it in around 30 minutes.”
International advertising agency DDB & Tribal Worldwide, Amsterdam has been an early adopter of Cube, using it to archive over a decade of TV, print, OOH and digital work. It is also being used by Smile Production, Barcelona and adverting agency Etcetera.
Due to Cube’s flexible, user friendly set up, it has also been used by cross-media, brand activation agency Lemz and international charity Doctors without Borders in order to create targeted, time-sensitive TV commercials in under an hour from creation to broadcast delivery, putting power into the hands of the brand as never before.
As Paulien Saraber, Campaign Manager, Doctors without Borders, comments: “Cube is very intuitive and easy to use. It allows us to create endless variations of a TV commercial and deliver it on the same day of broadcast.”
* GroupM (the media arm of the WPP Group) has predicted global ad revenue at $522bn, 2012
** No. 5: The Film, starring Nicole Kidman and directed by Baz Luhrmann, estimated to have cost €21m, 2004
Cube film credits:
Director: Adam Janeczeck
VFX Supervision: Stephen Pepper
VFX: Mark van Berkel
Grading: Brian Krijgsman
Music: Sebastiaan Roestenburg
Sound Design: Rens Pluijm