The interview excerpt below is the first of a three-part series we conducted with Maggie Burke, a Video Leader and head of EMC TV. Below, Maggie shares her thoughts on the role of video as a strategic driver of EMC’s marketing activities.

What is EMC TV?
EMC TV is the video production arm and the live broadcast arm of EMC corporate marketing.

Tell me about how EMC TV got its start.
Our goal when we began four years ago was to create a communications vehicle for the executives at EMC to be able to talk to the rest of the company using a video format. EMC is a very large global company, and there was a sense that the executives were having a difficult time communicating on a global scale with this huge employee base.  So EMC TV was designed to create executive opportunities and programming that we could stream to all of the offices.

But it has grown from there. Tell me how that came about.
Our CMO said, “Wow, let’s not stop here.  Let’s take EMC TV and make it a vehicle for spreading our message and our brand awareness externally as well as internally. From the initial mandate of creating communication vehicles for the executives to speak to the entire company, we broadened our focus to include a lot of external brand awareness, thought leadership campaigns, and high end video that could tell the EMC story. That took place over the course of about 4 years.  I think EMC TV now touches almost every stakeholder in our ecosystem from internal, external partners, costumers, all the way across the board.

Would you say video as a medium been embraced more recently by EMC?
EMC as a corporation has completely embraced video.  I think if you ask our CMO, he would tell you that video has become strategically important to EMC marketing. EMC TV has become incredibly, not only popular, but very visible within the company. Our services are always in demand and quite frankly is sort of be careful what you wish for because it’s hard for us sometimes to fulfill all the requests for videos.  So what we’ve done is we’ve learned to scale with vendors and use our ability to sort of create a secondary layer of people to handle all of the requests that come in.  But EMC as a whole has definitely embraced the whole video concept.

Let’s talk a little bit about the relationship between the work you do and the business.  I’d love to explore the impact of what EMC TV does and why it matters. I think what works for audiences in marketing today is real stories, well told.  Advertising still has its place, but I think today with all the various methods of delivery, on video and audio podcast and every way in which an audience will get information, that really good stories are what we are drawn to. That kind of storytelling really helps put a human face on a corporation.  And I think for EMC, that’s what we are doing with our videos.  We are putting that human face on a corporation that is doing something of great value on a very broad scale and something that will have an impact on all of our lives moving forward.

More specifically, how does your work impact the corporate culture here?
One of the great things we’ve been able to do for the corporate culture is to broadcast our quarterly meetings, our executive communications, and our product launches to all of our offices worldwide who can now be part of that. We very definitely have a more encompassing culture than we did four years ago.

Would you say the impact of EMC TV extends beyond the corporate culture?
We impact the business itself, even the bottom line. For example, one way that we directly impacted our bottom line is that we introduced a demo show called " Geek Pit" where we actually demo the products on a beautiful set that we built.  We run the show on the EMC store. When we put it on the store, it actually impacted sales, which we can track; people come into the store, watch [Geek Pit] and make a purchase.  So in that instance, we can track the video’s direct impact on the ROI.  We also receive anecdotal evidence from our sales force who will email us and say, “You know.  I showed that Vatican preservation video to a customer and sure enough made the deal.”  And I think the video had a large impact on making the deal.  So it’s anecdotal evidence but I think there are ways in which we can show the value of the video production that we are doing.

Where is EMC TV heading in the next 2-3 years?
Where we are going in the future is to continue that trajectory of great storytelling, working with partners like uStudio to make sure that we can distribute them and that we can reach the broadest audience, and to grow the reputation for this company as being devoted to both preserving history and to the future of IT technology. So, finding the great stories, telling the great stories and building that audience for the company that’s what we are all about.