Compass Media’s TimeBack project, which shares images of Cayman and its people from the Cayman Compass newspaper’s 60 years of archives, has won the CIMPA Campaign of the Year award.
Nine campaigns were shortlisted for this year’s award by the Cayman Islands Marketing Professionals Association, which held its annual conference and awards gala on Saturday, 18 April, at Hotel Indigo Grand Cayman.
Richy O’Carroll, the TimeBack project leader, who accepted the award on behalf of Compass Media, said one the company’s core values was “to be the heart of the community, and all our campaigns are centred around that”.
He added, “As Cayman’s only omnichannel media house with TV, radio, digital, newspaper, cinema, special publications and more, this is a special award for us.
“TimeBack started with us uncovering more than 300,000 old photo negatives upstairs in our archive. Thanks to Dart and [the Kenneth B. Dart Foundation] for their investment, we were able to fast track the digitising of these precious pieces of history.”
Explaining the process, O’Carroll said those negatives were shipped to Los Angeles on Cayman Airways, digitised and sent back to the island, where Compass Media created a tagging system for the photos. Each one was tagged with five data points, which are now synced with the company’s digital asset management system and used for research, reporting, and not a little reminiscing.
“With the help of Craig Merren and Kieron Rankine, we were able to assemble a squad of local reviewers who could identify and tag photos with a monthly collection of 100 photos being released onto timeback.ky and socials,” O’Carroll said. “Community tagging helped crowd source misspellings and missing pieces of information.”
The TimeBack collections project culminated in a six-month exhibition in the National Gallery last year, part of which can currently be seen at the Owen Roberts International Airport.
So far, a dozen collections of the archived photos have been released on timeback.ky and on social media, garnering more than two million views and impressions across all platforms. And the release of the collections is continuing, with many more photos reflecting Cayman’s history to come.
As well as thanking Dart and the Kenneth B. Dart Foundation for their investment to complete the project, O’Carroll also thanked Melissa Ladley, Ivan Burges and Roman Hapek for their contributions, and gave a special mention to BB&P for the logo and name creation.
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An award richly deserved by the Compass. The release of all these photos along with all the back copies of the Compass to the public at large, gives us all an unmatched picture of life in the Cayman Islands over the last 60 years. It is absolutely fascinating to see what was happening on a daily basis over such a long period of our history- well done the Compass!.