A View from the Top with Kodak vice president Danielle Atkins

It’s been a tough time for Kodak. When Danielle Atkins joined the company as vice president and global chief brand officer in 2014, the business was just emerging from bankruptcy, struggling to keep up with new trends and no longer resonating with younger audiences.

Four years later, Kodak is not completely out of the woods. But it’s already doing better, with a growing brand licensing business worth $3m (£2.3m) and a consumer division which brought $48m (£36.5m) in revenue during the third quarter of last year. Atkins was arguably one of the biggest players behind the brand’s revival. Throughout her career, she was never one to shy away from a challenge.

“When I left my position as a marketing director at Beats By Dre, my 17-year-old son asked me, ‘Why would you leave Beats for Kodak? What is Kodak?’” she tells The Independent.

“But for me, working for that brand, which in my mind was one of the greatest in the world, was a big exciting opportunity. Kodak had forgotten that they had a brand that people genuinely cared about.”

Her passion for the company started during her childhood in Penzance. John Adams, her father, was one of the pioneers of the west Cornwall surf scene in the 1960s and made Super 8mm films featuring local surfers, while her mother Sally was a stills photographer.

“When my brother and I were young we used to travel around with my parents, while my father was showing his movies,” Atkins says. “At that time you couldn’t see surf movies in the cinema and there was no video or YouTube.

“We had this incredibly bohemian lifestyle, where we were basically brought up on a beach. It was all about surfing, music and film.”

After graduating with a degree in history of art and medieval archaeology from UCL, she got a job at Pres.co, one of the first digital agencies working on some of the earliest websites in the late 1990s.

“We won Marks & Spencer as a client, and I remember being in front of their board aged 21, presenting our first digital campaign – it was a really disruptive time. The big advertisement agencies were still very dominant so what we were doing was very innovative.”

Moving quickly up the career ladder, Atkins held senior marketing positions at PwC, Nokia and Innovision, where she was responsible for dressing the city for the 2012 Olympic Games in London, including the notorious installation of the Olympic Rings on the Tower Bridge that she still refers to as one of the biggest highlights of her career.

Looking for her next challenge, she quit her job as director of creative expression at Nokia in 2013 for what was then a small start-up called Beats By Dre.

“It was a huge job but that’s the point about going to startups,” Atkins says. “Beats only had about 70 to 80 people employees at the time and the volume of work we did was incredible.”

Her energy and her collaborative approach saw massive growth in both the company’s sales and revenue. Notably, she led the team who made Beats the “most talked about brand” during the 2014 Brazil World Cup with “The Game Before The Game” campaign.

Featuring footballers including Cesc Fabregas, Luis Suarez, Daniel Sturridge ​and Brazil’s Neymar alongside non-sporting celebrities, the star-studded advert accumulated nearly 34 million views on YouTube.

“It was a five-minute video that we launched like a film and activated in every single city around the world,” Atkins says. “I was just 34-years-old at the time and working with a very young team. For us, it felt a huge job and it was thrilling every day.”

But things changed quickly when Beats was acquired by Apple in 2014.

“I enjoy working in a very fast-paced environment, which enables me to be entrepreneurial. This was very easy to do at Beats but much harder to do in a company like Apple. Some people from my team still work there, so it really depends on your personality, I think,” she says.

Six months after the acquisition, she was approached by Kodak and took a leap of faith leaving a thriving company for one barely emerging from bankruptcy. “What’s been amazing for me with this role is that I was able to make Kodak what I wanted,” she says.

“I always wanted to do a job I was passionate about and being part of the turnaround team at Kodak meant I could really allow myself to be creative.”

So how did she change the brand’s fortunes?

With very limited budgets, Atkins set about identifying who the brand’s customers were and came to understand that its heart and core audience came from the creative fields.

“When budgets are small, you have to be very creative for a start. You need to look at what you have and what you can work with. What I had was a brand with an amazing history, heritage and a legacy of incredible branding and graphic design.”

Part of the inspiration behind the redesign of the company was looking back at the heritage of the brand and weaving the vision of Kodak’s founder, George Eastman back into it.

For this reason, the first thing Atkins did was to bring back a similar iteration of the Kodak K logo introduced in 1971. “I started spotting old Kodak logos everywhere around the world, so I wanted to revive and bring back the colour into the logo,” she explains.

More than a hundred years earlier, Eastman had invented roll film, allowing photography to become a hobby of the masses.

“You don’t buy a Kodak Carousel slide viewer, you buy yesterday” – as Don Draper told Kodak’s executives at the end of Mad Men’s first season, in one of the TV show’s most poignant moments. “It’s a time machine.”

Atkins says: “With an amazing heritage brand like Kodak, leveraging that nostalgic element is important, but if you want to build a future business you can’t just rest on solely on heritage.”

But if Kodak was going to stage a comeback in consumers’ hearts, it needed today’s teenagers and influencers behind it. This was no small task.

When Atkins joined, Kodak didn’t even have an Instagram account – “just another example of how the brand had lost its way”.

Fast-forward four years, and it now has a healthy 400,000 followers, which Atkins describes as a community of creatives who care about the brand.

In fact, the company is resurrecting one of Kodak’s most popular films, Ektachrome – a colour reversal, or transparency, film launched in 1946 and discontinued in 2013.

Using her experience at Beats, Atkins also spearheaded a series of fashion collaborations with brands including Opening Ceremony and Forever 21.

The clothes for the latter were emblazoned with Kodak logos from the 1990s, harking back to when Kodak was the most recognisable photography brand.

“One thing I learned at Beats, is that there’s never a better promotion than someone recognisable wearing your brand,” Atkins says.

The vogue for all things analogue has also paved for the company to launch Kodachrome, an art magazine coined as a “new journal for anyone who loves art, film, and analogue culture”. The latest cover story was on Spike Lee, just after the release of BlacKkKlansman, which was shot on film.

Youngsters’ love affair with modern nostalgia is also helping to fuel demand for instant print, one of Kodak’s biggest sectors.

Atkins says: “Large numbers of still photographers and creative are turning their backs on digital technology in favour of film. There’s something romantic about the process.”

The reward was perhaps changing her son Zachary’s mind about Kodak.

“He now thinks what we’re doing is very cool and for me that is a sign we’re doing things right.”

Atkins certainly has energy. This year, she is training for a running race that will take her from Los Angeles to Las Vegas – 340 miles across the hostile terrain of the Nevada desert. With her brother last year she finished a bike ride from Cornwall to Mont Saint Michel in France.

“My father always said you should nail your colour to the mast,” she adds. “If someone tells me I can’t do something I automatically want to try.”

Atkins, also mother to Eli, 11, firmly believes that women shouldn’t choose between having a career and having a family.

“I was scared about having children, the whole idea of being pregnant scared me,” she says. “But I now consider them my two biggest achievements in life. It never stopped me from doing what I wanted.

“You just have to be organised and also set a good example to people in your team, especially if you’re in a leading position.

“I have to force myself to take an hour a day that is just for me – and it’s usually sports related or just walking my dog. You need that time, otherwise your head is always crowded with things.”

Atkins is now working on a business plan with an entrepreneur for Kodak’s latest project in the beauty sector – another first for the brand.

“There’s a connection between looking good on camera and the beauty industry,” she explains. “It’s one of the most exciting projects that we’ve got and it’s directly associated with Hollywood, film and glamour.

“Even if we’ve never done it before, it seems to be like there’s a natural connection. It’s all about always having a genuine commitment to innovation and creativity.”