The Clock Is Ticking on Your Brand's History
You've digitized your marketing stack. But have you saved your legacy?
At XR, most people know us for our advertising ops platform, the engine behind paying celebrities in ads, tracking rights, storing digital ads, and delivering them across every screen imaginable. We live in that world every day. But long before programmatic was a word anyone used at an Advertising Week happy hour, XR was doing something else entirely: physically storing the history of advertising for the world's biggest brands.
We still are.
XR operates warehouses across the United States that hold physical media, film reels, tapes, canisters, spanning virtually every format ever used to capture a commercial. Climate-controlled, weather-protected, fire-resistant, and locked down with enterprise-grade security. And covering ads dating back 50 plus years.
This isn’t a side hustle. It’s responsibility.
The XR Team Protecting Nearly a Million Ads
Mike Rizzotti, XR's VP of Physical Storage, and his team oversee more than 100,000 square feet of storage and nearly a million physical advertising assets. He's seen everything in his nearly two decades of running physical advertising storage, iconic launch spots, forgotten campaigns, and experimental work that never aired. He's also watching something troubling unfold in slow motion.
"Over the next 5-10 years, the hardware that support a lot of these old media formats will be extinct and the ability to digitize them will be impossible," Rizzotti warns. "It is critical that CMOs understand that the history of their brands are at stake here. You have to start digitizing and storing these archived assets in the cloud now before it's too late."
He's talking about one-inch and three-quarter-inch tape formats, the workhorses of advertising production from the 1970s through the late 1990s. These formats are on the verge of extinction. The companies that once manufactured the equipment no longer support it. The engineers who knew how to service those machines? Mostly retired. Every year that passes, the window to recover what's on those tapes gets smaller.
Why Your Brand's Past Is Part of Its Future
Here's something that happens at XR more often than you might think: a new CMO or Creative Director comes in, and one of their first calls is to Rizzotti and the XR warehouse. They want to see where the brand came from. They want to watch the original spots, understand the design DNA, feel the original creative tension that made the brand mean something.
Think about Nike Air Jordan. One of the most storied brand stories in the world. Its entire mythology is built on a foundation, those early spots with Michael Jordan and Spike Lee. That footage isn't just nostalgia. It's the proof of the brand's identity. It's the origin story that makes every subsequent chapter make sense.
The same goes for Coca-Cola, Wendy’s, Budweiser, and many more.
“Understanding your history anchors your future, creatively and culturally,” said Rizzotti. “When brands lose that history, they are not just losing archives, they are losing the record of the storytellers and brave creative bets that defined them.”
In fact, just last week, Folgers kicked off a new campaign that reimagines and remixes its iconic “The Best Part of Wakin’ Up” jingle, featuring throwback fonts and logos from the brand’s past. It’s a smart move that reaches back into its history to anchor the brand’s future.
The Call to Action CMOs Can't Ignore
If your brand has physical assets sitting in storage, tapes, film, or canisters from campaigns you may not even remember producing, the time to act is now. Not next quarter. Not after the next rebrand. Now.
XR can help you assess what you have, prioritize what needs to be digitized, and move it safely into our Ad AMP platform where it's accessible, protected, and yours forever.
Don't let the clock run out. Talk to the XR team today.
XR is the world's second largest provider of physical asset storage for media, with warehouses across the U.S. and a digital ad ops platform built to store, manage, and deliver advertising assets at scale.
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