Celebrate Your Company’s Milestone Anniversaries

Every brand has a story. From its inception to its evolution over the years, your company’s history is filled with moments that define its identity.

Yet, many organisations overlook the marketing potential of their own archives. As your milestone anniversary approaches, you have a unique opportunity to celebrate your brand’s journey, engage your audience, and create impactful content that strengthens brand loyalty.

However, a common challenge stands in the way: accessibility.

Unlocking Your Brand’s History Through Digitisation

Your organisation may hold a treasure trove of historical materials—old photographs, loose letters, bound books, VHS tapes, Betamax, audio reels, film reels, glass plate negatives, and even physical items such as product packaging or the products themselves—that capture key moments from your past.

But without the means to digitise, view, or share these materials, their potential remains locked away.

At TownsWeb Archiving, we specialise in digitising archival collections, ensuring fragile and outdated materials are transformed into high-quality digital assets. By digitising your brand’s history, you create an invaluable resource that can be leveraged for marketing, PR, and internal storytelling.

We can digitise a variety of Audio Visual materials.

Digitise old photographs - whether loose pictures, photo albums, 35mm slides or film strips, and even glass plate negatives.

Once digitised, we can bring your bound books, journals, magazines, newspapers, manuscripts, registers, and loose documents to life with PastView.

From Physical Archives to Engaging Digital Experiences

Once your assets are digitised with us, access and discovery become just as important as preservation.

Our online platform, PastView, takes your digitised materials and presents them in an engaging way. Whether you want to showcase your archives in an interactive timeline, host a visual gallery of historical brand images, or create a digital exhibition of past product designs, PastView offers the tools to bring your history to life - with key features, such as:

• Text Recognition: Whether OCR or HTR, PastView’s text recognition technology will effortlessly transcribe typed and handwritten documents making them keyword searchable.
• Audio-Visual Recognition: Let PastView’s audio-visual transcription technology convert every spoken word into searchable text, making your collections more accessible than ever before.
• Face & Image Tagging: Your photographic collections will benefit from facial recognition and automated tagging, enhancing discoverability and making access a breeze.
• Book Explorer: Turn the pages of your digitised books like you're holding them in your hands. Plus, examine every intricate detail of your drawings and photographs using the deep zoom feature.
• Object Viewer: Spin and inspect your 3D models and artifacts from every angle.

Our PastView platform offers interactive timelines, mapped with key events over the years.

Bring Your Brand’s Journey to Life Through Storytelling

Your heritage is a powerful asset. By delving into your archives, you can uncover forgotten gems that showcase your company’s evolution. Mining visual history can lead to creative opportunities, such as:

• Documentary-style brand storytelling.
• Social media nostalgia campaigns (e.g., ‘Then vs. Now’ comparisons of products, staff, and office locations).
• Video retrospectives highlighting major milestones.
• Behind-the-scenes insights from the brand’s earliest days.
• Interactive timelines mapped with key events over the years.

Yet, none of this is possible if your content remains trapped in outdated formats. If your marketing team stumbles upon tapes, reels, or old photographs but has no way to access them, we can help. Our digitisation services transform these materials into accessible, high-quality assets—ready to be shared with the world through PastView.

Captivate your audience with high-resolution zooming.

Typed Text Recognition (OCR) helps drive engagement with integrated searching.

Provide an immersive experience with our 3D page-turning BookExplorer.

Connecting Heritage to Cultural Moments

Your anniversary isn’t just about celebrating internal success—it’s an opportunity to connect with broader cultural moments.

Positioning your historical brand content within the context of societal trends and events makes anniversary campaigns more engaging and relevant. For example:

• Showcasing how your brand evolved alongside major industry shifts.
• Revisiting old advertisements and repurposing them for modern audiences.
• Celebrating long-standing customer relationships through shared memories.

PastView allows audiences to explore your journey in an interactive and immersive way, making your history a valuable asset for engagement.

Why Timing is Everything

The success of an anniversary campaign hinges on preparation. A well-executed celebration doesn’t happen overnight—it requires strategic planning, ideally up to 12 months in advance.

This ensures time for us to:

• Digitise your historical archive materials, including metadata creation.
• Build your PastView website and populate it with all your digital material, creating an engaging and immersive access and discovery experience.

And for you to:

• Develop a cohesive storytelling approach.
• Align with PR, social media, and content marketing strategies.
• Create high-quality visuals and videos from your newly digitised materials.

Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) results help to aid discovery.

Bringing Physical Heritage to Life with 360° Viewing

If your brand produces physical goods—whether bottled drinks, footwear, or luxury items—you have an even greater opportunity to showcase your history.

Our 360-degree object viewer within PastView allows you to present your heritage products in stunning detail, giving audiences an interactive way to explore packaging, branding evolution, and craftsmanship.

Whether it’s a vintage whisky bottle, a classic sneaker design, or an early product prototype, PastView bridges the gap between physical history and digital storytelling.

Insect digitised physical items with our PastView 360° Object Viewer

How We Helped HSBC Celebrate 160 Years

One of the most notable examples of brand heritage storytelling is HSBC’s 160-year celebration. To mark the milestone, HSBC launched the HSBC History Website, providing employees, customers, and researchers a single access point to explore the bank’s journey.

We’re proud that PastView powers this vast digital collection, enabling visitors to discover HSBC’s history through digitised records, smuggled wartime notes, 360-degree models, modern banking innovations, and more. Adding to the experience, their London Archive VR Tour offers an immersive way to explore this culturally significant collection like never before.

From digitisation and metadata capture to seamless online access, our work ensures HSBC’s rich history is preserved and shared in engaging new ways.

HSBC's History Website - Powered by our PastView platform.

Take the First Step Towards Preserving Your Legacy

Without digitisation, you risk missing out on incredible content. Physical archives are inaccessible and fragile, making it difficult to integrate them into modern digital campaigns. By digitising your assets and making them available through PastView, you can:

• Protect and preserve your original physical archives.
• Share your brand’s legacy for future generations.
• Repurpose old footage and images for social media, websites, and presentations.
• Create compelling video content for internal and external audiences.
• Ensure easy access to your historical content without outdated playback equipment.

Trusted by Leading Global Brands

TownsWeb Archiving and PastView have helped some of the world’s biggest brands unlock their archives and bring their histories to life. We’ve partnered with:

• M&S (retail & fashion)
• GSK (pharmaceuticals)
• Unilever (FMCG)
• Boots (health & beauty)
• Twinings (heritage tea brand)
• HSBC (financial services)
• Diageo (spirits & beverages)
• Pernod Ricard (spirits & beverages)
• And many more.

Whether you're preparing for an upcoming milestone or simply looking to future-proof your archives, TownsWeb Archiving is here to help you digitise, protect, and share your history with the world - so don't hesitate to get in touch with our friendly team.