Many businesses have a few boxes stored away: old tapes, outdated hard drives, printed materials, or archived media that haven’t been touched in years. These are forgotten assets. While they may seem outdated or irrelevant, they can often be transformed into useful resources that support marketing, operations, or compliance.
From camcorder tapes of company events to folders of past training manuals, these materials can do far more than collect dust. Here seven practical ways to put them to good use.
1. Create Brand Storytelling Content
Old footage from office events, customer interviews, or product launches often captures moments that feel genuine and unscripted. These clips can help tell the story of your business in a way that feels real and relatable. When people see the faces and voices behind your brand from years past, it creates a connection that polished campaigns sometimes miss.
This type of content works especially well on your website’s about page, social media, or email newsletters. It’s also a subtle way to show progress over time without saying a word.
Even if those memories are locked away in formats from the ’90s or early 2000s, they still have value and can be brought back to life. It’s easy to convert camcorder tapes to digital, and once they’re digitised, you can save them to the cloud, share them with your team, or even edit them into new content.
2. Build a Company History Timeline
Every business has a history worth sharing. A timeline that highlights important milestones—your founding date, first product, major expansions, or awards—helps show your growth and credibility.
Archived photos, documents, and video clips can be pieced together to build this story visually. You might find footage of your original office, early team members, or legacy branding that feels outdated but still holds meaning.
Having a timeline on your website or in marketing materials not only builds trust, but it also gives long-time employees something to be proud of and newer team members a better sense of the company’s journey.
3. Enhance Recruitment with Culture Clips
Today’s job seekers are interested in more than just job descriptions—they want to know what it’s like to work for your company. If you’ve got old footage of team-building days, company parties, or casual office moments, these can show your long-standing values and work culture.
Clips from five or ten years ago, showing employees working together or celebrating milestones, can be especially effective in employer branding. They give potential hires a glimpse into how your culture has grown while staying consistent over time.
Include these in recruitment videos, your careers page, or social media to make your workplace feel more welcoming and genuine.
4. Create Social Media Throwback Campaigns
Throwback content never goes out of style—especially on social media. “Throwback Thursday” and similar trends give businesses the perfect excuse to dig into their archives.
Snippets of old product launches, behind-the-scenes footage, or even quirky office moments can make for great engagement posts. People love to see how things used to be and how much has changed.
This is fun way to show your personality or remind customers and followers that your business has story. It also a clever way to reuse materials that already exist, instead of constantly creating something new.
Make sure these clips are clear and high quality. That might mean taking the time to digitise older formats so they’re ready for posting.
5. Develop Training or Onboarding Materials
Training new staff takes time, and having reliable, consistent materials makes all the difference. Old internal recordings, past team meetings, or early tutorials may still hold relevant lessons.
Instead of starting from scratch, review archived materials and see what can be updated. Older video or audio can often be refreshed with a new introduction or summary, making it useful again for today’s team.
This approach helps preserve institutional knowledge, especially if some of your more experienced employees are no longer with the company. It also creates a sense of continuity that supports better onboarding.
6. Generate Long-Form Content from Archived Assets
If your company has recorded conferences, interviews, presentations, or speeches over the years, you’re sitting on a goldmine of content. Those recordings can be transcribed and turned into blog posts, case studies, white papers, or even podcast episodes.
This is a great way to expand your content library without needing to start with a blank page. For example, a 10-year-old industry talk might still contain relevant insights today. Add some updated context, and you’ve got something new and valuable.
Digitising and organising these materials makes them much easier for content and marketing teams to access and use.
7. Preserve Legal or Compliance Records
Not all forgotten assets are exciting, but some are critically important. Older recordings may include meetings, contracts, compliance discussions, or intellectual property evidence that could still be relevant in the future.
Storing these materials properly is essential for risk management and legal protection. If they’re still on outdated formats, now’s the time to digitise them for secure, long-term access.
Once converted, these files can be stored in encrypted drives or backed up to the cloud, giving you peace of mind and quick retrieval if ever needed for audits or legal reviews.
It’s easy to forget how valuable this kind of documentation can be until the moment you need it.
Businesses often invest in new tools and resources while older ones go unused, but there’s a lot to gain from looking back. Tucked away in your archives could be stories that inspire, insights that inform, or records that protect your company’s future.
The key is to take stock of what you already have, especially anything stored in outdated formats, and decide what’s worth saving, sharing, or reusing. Digitising these materials is usually the first step toward bringing them back to life.
Even small efforts—like uploading an old clip for a social media post or pulling a quote from a past keynote—can have a big impact. So before you write off that dusty box in the cupboard, take another look. You might find more value than you expected.
