Unlocking a Decade of Television Advertising in the BFI National Archive

Preservation & Migration Seminar 2026 - Dublin, Ireland Speaker: Stephen McConnachie (BFI) -- The BFI National Archive has been recording UK broadcast television off-air for 40 years, and for the last 10 years that recording has been automated, achieving 24/7/365 capture of 18 channels. Within those automated recordings we have recorded every advertisement broadcast across the UK’s commercial services – ITV, Channel Four and Channel 5 – creating a comprehensive document of the nation’s promotional tv content, through a decade of major political and social upheaval such as Brexit and the Covid pandemic. This important – and very large – collection is undocumented and difficult to access. This presentation describes parallel projects to change that: – Using metadata licensed from an advertising industry data provider, to create records for all the adverts, in our Collections Information Database, making this collection fully searchable, with rich descriptive metadata – Using the timings in that metadata, to generate access to the digital media via our Digital Preservation Infrastructure, enabling visitors to BFI Southbank to discover and view the collection – Collaborating on a post-doctoral research project with Kings College London’s Computational Humanities group to explore the potential for machine learning and computer vision to augment understanding and documentation of the adverts, driving improvements in access and analysis of this huge dataset