The combination of Apple Xsan and a robotic Tape Library makes Mann Made Media fly

When we talk about ‘corporate memory’ we are most often referring to the cultural history of a company or organisation. Too often this memory rests in the minds of older employees as anecdotes, or as tapes, pictures and documents locked in the physical archives of discarded boxes stowed away in dusty basement rooms.

In both instances unlocking the power of this resource can be haphazard and unproductive and so much of this innate value can lie untapped and inaccessible.

This is just one reason why the explosion of digital data storage is invaluable to us at Mann Made Media – not only for the operational value of instantly retrievable video and multimedia materials, but also as a service we offer our clients.

To date we have archived around 88 Terabytes of data since we started our digital archiving system just two years ago.  This is the equivalent of over 18,700 DVD’s. (If we had to archive that way, we’d need a stack of DVD’s about 260m high!) At DVD video quality, 88TB would be enough to hold just short of 6 years of continuous video.

To put this in perspective, it is estimated that the total Internet traffic for the year 1993 amounted to approximately 100TB.

But the real value of archives is what you can do with them, and when you consider that the Apollo 11 Landing Module needed just 74KB of memory to land on the moon you can appreciate what we can achieve with vision, creativity and a vast library of visual resources at our command.

Which is why we’re happy to see this vast repository of client collateral as one small step for Mann, one giant leap for Mannkind!

PowerPoint "Safety Officers" at Standard Bank PBB Conference

The idea of Corporate Theatre gets mixed reviews from clients all too often, and this is largely because some event production companies have absolutely no experience in writing professional scripts.

Although any company can buy in the services of professional playwrights, too often they choose to do it in-house, and the resulting scripts are written by people who mistake duration for drama, complexity for comedy and information for inspiration.

At Mann Made Media we don’t do that. We not only employ the services of practicing theatre professionals to write, direct and perform in our corporate and industrial theatrical productions, we also choose the project where this exciting live interactive medium will most effectively serve the intended message.

As we did recently for the Standard Bank Private Business Banking conference.

Here our client was looking for an engaging and compelling way to communicate critical subject matter to a mass audience over a series of one-day events. With content ranging from target market insights to corporate structures to inter-departmental relations, Mann Made Media came up with a host of unique and compelling characters, each of whom conveyed carefully scripted character-based information, performed in a personable manner that was both highly amusing and completely engaging!

You know you’ve got a hit on your hands as a production company when you have the audience reacting to your performers, and you know you’ve made the right choice as a client when you hear your audience quoting your content in the tea breaks.

That’s the true power of theatre – whether it be corporate or industrial – to be effective it simply has to be professional.

Newspaper Vendors tell the story of Toyota SA's 30 years of market leadership

Toyota National Dealers Convention

Many of his plays have been professionally produced around the world including London, Sao Paulo, Dublin, Krakow, Copenhagen and Johannesburg. Most recently, his play The Trojan Women was produced off Broadway in New York.

Nick has received a number of awards including the Writer’s Bursary from the Arts Council of Great Britain, a clutch of international awards for Takalani Sesame radio and TV, a small flock of Loeries for his experiential work, and the international Philip Pullman Young Minds Book of the Year Award for his memoir Thirty Years in a Turtleneck Sweater.

Nick is excited by the opportunities presented at Mann Made Media. ”It’s great to work with a solid team of inspired people who are unhindered by the weight of experience. They are constantly coming up with astounding, original and technically innovative ideas that they have the skills and the energy to bring to life. I am enjoying myself, and looking forward to the future.”

Nick’s appointment signals a new era for Mann Made Media, as a wealth of creative and strategic experience is coupled with the company’s legendary passion, technical innovation and creative fearlessness. This new formula offers a refreshing alternative to those experiential clients looking for high quality, cutting-edge creative and production services.

This was the question posed by our clients at Standard Bank PPB Africa after we produced their recent Sales Summit. As usual with creative clients who want to push the envelope, the brainstorm results were surprising and exciting.

We conceived a multimedia pack of written materials containing instructions, questions and feedback forms, together with a call for video and stills footage feedback and commentary from all members of our video audience right across Africa.

The core idea is that rather than passively watch the video productions, the audiences are invited to give real usable feedback in multimedia formats that will be broadcast on internal TV. It will also create real on-the-ground feedback data that can be used in future conference gatherings, and finesse the sales activities of all countries in the future.

Once again we are fortunate to be working with an innovative client who is looking for cutting-edge thinking from their communications partner. We are delighted to be moving forward together.

For the Mann Made Media team, one of the most interesting and rewarding experiences of working on this project is in discovering and leveraging an absolutely massive market of consumers and talent that was previously unknown to us.

Look out for Aki and Pawpaw appearing on an AG Cellular mobile screen near you soon.