Overview

As the world governing body of tennis, the International Tennis Federation (ITF) administers and regulates the game through 210 affiliated national associations and six regional associations. As a result, the ITF has a vast back catalogue of archive footage that can be used by marketing departments and for licensing.

However, as the archive spanned many years, around 98% of the content was stored in physical formats off-site. Retrieving the content in the proper format introduced significant delay, often leading to opportunities being missed.

ITF needed a solution that could consolidate all of their content, ingesting archive assets and combining with digital-born assets in a platform that allowed for content to be discovered quickly and used right away.

The opportunity

The majority of ITF’s archive was stored on hundreds of rolls of film, SD, HD, XDCAM and BetaCam tapes. This meant that a request had to be made to pull the tape, digitise the content, generate the clip and then deliver it. The process could take up to 48 hours, which was far too slow to allow teams to be reactive.

A key requirement, therefore, was a platform that could easily ingest the archive content, with detailed metadata tagging. This would then allow ITF staff to quickly search and retrieve content directly, and even allow member nations and federations to do the same.

As a world-renowned brand, ITF also wanted the platform to reflect their brand and to make it look as good as possible so they could market it more effectively.

The Solution

With Imagen, ITF now have access to over 200 (and growing) ingested archive assets in addition to more than 500 hours of digital-born content, all from a single cloud-based platform. Thanks to metadata tagging and time-based metadata, teams can now create collections of content aimed at specific clients, aiding the pitching process.

The platform also makes it simple for social media and digital marketing teams to put together campaigns quickly, and react to evolving circumstances. For example, previously the social media team had wanted footage of Andy Murray for 2015 to support a story about his hip surgery, but was unable to get the content in time. With the improved speed and discoverability that Imagen delivers, such missed opportunities are now a thing of the past.

“Thanks to the Imagen platform we can now react quickly, promoting current events with related archive content,” said Bethany Lowney, Commercial Department of ITF. “Marketing teams are now able to quickly make use of winning points and celebrations, and the opportunities for clip sales and licensing has increased too.”

As a key component in their 5-year digitisation strategy, the Imagen platform has allowed ITF to reap considerably higher value from its extensive archive of content, while also ensuring clients and member federations engage with their brand at every stage of the process. It has saved time, allowed marketing teams to be more responsive and creative, and helped to increase opportunities to grow their licensing revenue.

Key Features

• Main repository for 5-year digitisation plan
• Simple ingest of archive content in multiple formats
• Time-based metadata tagging to find key moments
• Simple and intuitive search
• Single repository accessible to staff and member federations
• ITF branded platform
• Fast downloads of high-resolution files
• Easy to create clips and collections

"With Imagen, our marketing teams are now able to quickly make use of winning points and celebrations, and the opportunities for clip sales and licensing has increased too"

Bethany Lowney, Commercial Department, ITF