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Market Voice 5 Feb 2024 - 3 min read

20x content demand incoming: Marketers and agencies need stronger, smarter content supply chains to keep up

By Scott King - APAC Principal Strategist for Industry, Adobe Digital Strategy Group | Partner Content

Demand for content is predicted to explode up to 20x over the next few years, putting already stretched marketing and creative teams under huge pressure to deliver impactful content faster, cheaper, at much higher volume – and make it personalised. Only strong, streamlined content supply chains powered by generative AI can make that kind of quantum leap, says Scott King, APAC Principal Strategist for Industry, Adobe Digital Strategy Group.

Modern experience-led organisations confront escalating challenges in their journey to craft compelling experiences. The expectation of the connected consumer is for personalised content to be consistently delivered at every brand interaction. Yet today’s content authoring workflows are complex while time and budgets are increasingly constrained.

Marketing and creative teams are under unprecedented pressure to craft and manage impactful content at increased velocity while simultaneously reducing cost. The latest research reveals over the past two years alone the demand for content has doubled, with projections indicating this will imminently increase five to twenty times – a testament to the mounting expectations placed on these teams.

This means the content authoring complexity and velocity challenge increases exponentially; fuelled by increasing consumer expectations for personalisation, alongside the proliferation of brand interaction points. Consumers expect highly personalised experiences across all interactions, necessitating tailored content be created for micro-segments or even individuals. And these experiences must be optimised for distribution across a growing array of channels and devices. For example, a personalised offer for an individual must be consumable via an email on a laptop, an app on a smartphone or a scripted conversation with a call centre specialist.  

The opportunity then for organisations to realise an improved content supply chain is imperative. Increased content authoring agility means a faster and more dynamic response to customer needs and market shifts, with an ability to personalise to more tailored customer demands. All of which equates to increased customer satisfaction, content performance and ultimately business returns. Simultaneously, reduced time in content production improves time-to-market for experience authoring and management, employee experience and decreases business overheads.

Most marketers are already struggling to keep pace with demand and increasing customer expectations, with only a third (32 per cent) stating that their digital experience is meeting customers’ needs. With 26 per cent of Australian and New Zealand brands having already cut marketing and customer experience budgets, and an additional 30 per cent expected to do so in the next twelve months, brands need to establish a strong content supply chain – the process of producing and delivering content – to meet content demands in a more efficient way. 


The underpinnings of a strong content supply chain

For most organisations, the content supply chain - the process of producing and delivering the content for effective customer experiences – feels like a chaotic web of disconnected workflows, teams and systems. Most content-to-activation cycles involve weeks of time, manual handoffs, and multiple rounds of approvals. The result feels like a clumsy collaboration that chews up time and leads to inconsistent communication to customers, where a piece of content may be available in one channel, but not another. 

Optimising the content supply chain can deliver multiple benefits: reduce overheads, improve employee experience by removing laborious tasks, and improve customer satisfaction through consistent, personalised experiences. Yet, more than a third of organisations say they are unable to quantify the amount of time they’ve lost to inefficient supply chains, and those that can say it’s at least five hours a week per employee.[1]

A content supply chain powered by generative AI

According to a report by McKinsey & Company, 71 per cent of consumers expect brands to deliver personalised experiences and 76 per cent get frustrated when this doesn’t happen. No team can deliver thousands of uniquely personalised experiences across hundreds or thousands of customer segments manually, especially when faced with disconnected teams, ad-hoc work processes, and terabytes of information trapped in silos.
 
To solve the challenges of delivering content for every customer, an end-to-end, automated, intelligent system is needed, one that natively integrates work management, asset management, and creative tools. This will allow teams to effectively strategise, create, iterate, manage, and deliver personalised content, while also accelerating the process.

The most effective content supply chain enables marketers and creatives to find and manage all content from across the business in one place without needing to toggle between applications or waste time on manual tasks. This process is further assisted by automation, with systems that alert the right team member when they are assigned new tasks, streamlining the content review cycles and readying assets for finalisation. When powered with generative AI, a single asset can have dozens of variations authored at the touch of a button, allowing creatives or marketers to easily and efficiently create more hyper-personalised assets to connect with consumers across the growing number of touchpoints and channels.
 
Brands saving valuable times and dollars

In today's competitive landscape, teams thinking about how to integrate workflows to manage and measure content have the competitive advantage. An end-to-end content supply chain solution such as Adobe GenStudio not only increases the flow of content but saves valuable time and money.

Global telecoms giant T-Mobile transformed its entire marketing workflow to eliminate silos between marketing teams, automate time-consuming tasks, and simplify its approach to content. T-Mobile had major bottlenecks in their processes that delayed campaigns and business communications. By optimising their end-to-end content supply chain, they were able to reduce business overheads, be more responsive to market trends and deliver more relevant communications to customers. For employees, the time saved allowed them to plan and deliver more impactful campaigns by focusing on the customer experience, rather than onerous content authoring tasks. T-Mobile saved upwards of $2 million across its marketing division by consolidating workflows while increasing output by 47 per cent.

Streamlining the content supply chain and embracing generative AI tools will enable marketing and creative teams to plan, produce and deliver campaigns more effectively. As a result, it enables the generation of high-quality, personalised content that maintains consistent brand messaging, accessible across all customer interaction points, thereby enhancing content engagement and the overall customer experience. In turn, these personalised and agile experiences increased content performance while reducing content authoring overheads.

 

[1] “The case for a stronger content supply chain”, Adobe and London Research, 2023

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