Yesterday, the blogosphere was alive with the 'previously unreleased' footage of Michael Jackson's hair catching on fire during the shooting of that infamous Pepsi commercial in 1984.

Last night, the Twitterverse was alive with comments like "I can't believe CNN showed that publicly - how the heck did Pepsi let that happen?"

By this afternoon, Pepsi was doing some major damage control, releasing a statement saying, "We don't know how the footage became available. Twenty-five years later, we'd question why anyone would want to share such frightening images....We don't know what that footage is. It's 25 years ago. We don't know who owns it, so we have no recourse as far as I know."

Well, I can tell you one thing, Ms Pepsi Spokesperson:  If you and your ad agency had a better employee retention and knowledge transfer strategy, you wouldn't be in this mess.

In 1984, no one was shooting behind-the-scenes videos on their cellphones.  The only person in a position to get this shot (directly behind MJ as he starts his routine at the top of the stage under the marquee) was one of the professional camera people from the production house your ad agency hired to shoot this commercial.

This commercial was a big, big deal for Pepsi:  They struck a record-breaking deal with the Jackson brothers (apparently they couldn't get Michael without buying all the others) whose $5 million pricetag set the stage for all the huge celebrity endorsements to follow.

Of course, Pepsi wasn't producing the commercial themselves; it was their ad agency, BBDO, who was responsible for the idea, producing the spot (using an outsourced production company), and managing the larger campaign.

Having worked in big ad agencies, I can tell you that a project of this magnitude - the whole thing had sparked a huge media frenzy even before MJ's hair caught on fire - would have been wrapped up tighter than a drum.  Access to the shoot and post-production would have been restricted, and all the footage would have been logged and accounted for.  Remember, this was shot on film - not just video - which is expensive to transfer.

For a whole lot of reasons, ad agencies archive all their old footage - not just the finished commercials, but the raw footage too.  Many production houses have whole divisions dedicated to archiving footage, and they charge agencies (and other clients) an annual fee to storing this stuff in secure, climate-controlled environments. 

This means that (a) all the MJ footage is living somewhere right now; and (b) someone at BBDO or Pepsi is getting an annual bill for storing it.

Which means that someone - and probably several someones - knew exactly where that footage has been all this time.

But the turnover at ad agencies is enormous:  The philosophy has long been that there are zillions of people dying to work at places like BBDO, so they work employees to death, pay them peanuts, and don't do much to retain employees.

And it's the junior employees - the ones who keep track of all the boring admin details, like where footage is stored - who are most likely to leave with minimal notice and without ever meeting their replacement, so knowledge transfer is sketchy at best.

Which is how companies like Pepsi can get blindsided by leaked footage, and why they haven't got a clue where it came from or how to plug the leak.

Another great example of how investing in HR is a long-term play.