NEWS BRIEFS

Atlanta, GA and White Plains Armonk, NY — IBM and The Coca-Cola Company announced that Coca-Cola is the first non-media company to leverage IBM’s most most advanced digital asset management technology to create a unique powerful resource for managing archival information. The new Coca-Cola digital archive system makes a century’s worth of corporate marketing and advertising icons available at the desktop through a worldwide internal corporate network, allowing Coca-Cola employees to more easily access and use the material for future projects.

Until now, only a small handful of media companies have attempted such an extensive digital asset management system library, and those efforts have focused primarily on video. However, this new system combines distinct libraries of text, still images and video to build an integrated digital archival library, which is then made available as a business tool to Coca-Cola employees and associates in more than 200 countries.

With the capacity to manage millions of items, the Coca-Cola digital archive is a common location for storing, updating, managing and disseminating these historical assets online. The system improves communications and collaboration by giving users a powerful, online research tool that can easily search, organize, distribute and share the historical information.

The new knowledge digital management system currently includes tens of thousands of video clips, photographs, and many of The Coca-Cola Company’s most famous marketing and advertising icons, from Norman Rockwell’s Americana imagery to the famous “Coca-Cola Hilltop” television commercial featuring the memorable “I’d like to teach the world to sing Buy the World a Coke” tune. It also includes important internal documents, press releases, policy statements and key marketing campaigns for such showcase events as the Olympic Games, FIFA World Cup and Super Bowl.

The Coca-Cola Digital Archival materials are organized across three separate libraries:, an image library, with more than 9,000 graphical images; a document library, with more than 7,000 text documents; and an advertising library, which containedultimately will contain more than 25,000 television ads and corporate videos, including commercial videos. Current Coca-Cola advertising and marketing materials are automatically stored in are already stored in a digital formats and then will be will be added to The Coca-Cola Company’s digital archive to ensure an ongoing historical record.

The Coca-Cola digital management archives system is built on a foundation of IBM’s Content Manager and Lotus Notes Domino software. A team of IBM Global Services project managers, application developers, web designers and systems integrators worked jointly with Coca-Cola and drew from expertise, products and technologies from across the world’s largest information technology company.

How It Works

For example, if a Coca-Cola advertising team is working on a new “holiday” campaign, a team member can search the Digital Archives for “holiday” or “Christmas” or “Santa Claus” ads, and pull up the entire spectrum of text and video advertisements created on the subject. The team member can search for many topics across different types of data sources simultaneously through a specific keyword, a year, a brand, an image, or even a specific string of text. Once the system returns a list of all documents, images and video matching the search criteria, the team can then view the work online, and order high or low-resolution graphics and copies for reference materials.

The images and video also include “metadata” — similar to the extensive credits and key information for movies on DVDs — that gives the pertinent information about the image or television ad, including the director, the date, important information on rights or restrictions and cross references to other material in the library.

“More Than A Retrieval System.”

“The Coca-Cola Company has a rich and extensive archive of imagery and documents that defines our company and our brand. While preservation and retrieval of that material is important, we also wanted to create a robust system that would enable our employees in more than 200 countries to efficiently access our historical data and work collaboratively all from their desktops,” said Phillip F. Mooney, director, Corporate Archives, The Coca-Cola Company.

“Coca-Cola has an outstanding vision for how to make the most of its priceless historical assets. They are one of the first corporations to move its entire advertising and brand history to an online Digital Media environment,” said Dick Richard Anderson, general manager, Digital Media Solutions, IBM. Media and Entertainment Industry, IBM. “Even more important than corporate preservation, this type of advanced enterprise content management technology can enable corporations to re-purpose valuable assets, as well as improve efficiency, speed, continuity and collaboration in a way that gives them a competitive advantage.”

“Coca-Cola is at the very early stage of an important new trend. The growth of e-business is increasing the need for companies to manage and distribute digital content, including images, computer-generated output, business documents, and rich media,” said Mr. Anderson. ” In fact, studies show that more than 85% of today’s business information resides in sources beyond traditional databases, and less than 5% of that content is digitized.”

The Technology

To deliver an integrated digital library, Coca-Cola created an easy-to-use user interface that is sophisticated enough to communicate with The Coca-Cola Company’s various servers, databases, and existing archives. The user interface, for example, is simple enough to perform searches based on simple keywords. Users can easily search multiple repositories with one query and search actual content or words. They also can separate the actual object from the important metadata attached to it.

To accomplish the search, the Library uses Lotus Domino Webserver, which communicates the search request to custom Java Servelets created by IBM web application developers. Those Java Servelets, in turn, interface with the IBM Oracle Content Manager middleware. Oracle Content Manager acts as the centerpiece of the application design, coordinating the search through IBM eServer pSeries servers running AIX, until the appropriate icon is found. Content Manager then re-routes the graphic back to the user.

IBM’s Oracle Content Manager is a first-of- its-kind offering that leverages IBM’s experience in rich media and document management technologies. It allows for the creation, capture, storage, management and distribution of digital content — including images, computer generated output, business documents and audio and video content. This enables corporations to electronically share critical business information in any format with suppliers, customers, partners and employees — a crucial step in the e-business transformation.

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