by Eric Hall
As the creative community gathers at Adobe MAX in Los Angeles this week, we’re showcasing not just amazing creative technologies such as Adobe Firefly — our industry-defining family of generative AI models — but also solutions that drive collaboration between creative professionals and marketers. One of this year’s key themes is empowering enterprises to supercharge their content development processes.
Personalized marketing, technological innovation, and digital adoption have dramatically changed the landscape for content development, as digital-first enterprises strive to reach customers across media channels, screens, and in-store locations. Because of this, the need for content is exploding. In the past two years alone, organizations’ content demands have doubled — and they’re only going to accelerate.
Operating a modern digital business requires planning, creating, managing, sharing, activating, and storing a vast quantity of content. An enterprise-class catalog with 1,000 products will likely have 25 assets per product, multiplied by 15 supported regions. That’s 375,000 assets — a massive content development undertaking that requires a comprehensive, streamlined content supply chain. When we recently tallied our own content at Adobe, we discovered hundreds of thousands of written, designed, or produced marketing assets — not including customized content, in-product “how-to” guides, press releases, or executive keynotes.
All of these assets are produced within content supply chains. Yet even at the most digital-savvy brands, content supply chains are often tangles of disconnected people, processes, and technologies, all operating less than optimally. As a result, most companies wear down their creative and marketing teams, losing time and money to fragmented workflows.
Steps for creating an efficient content supply chain
If you’re leading a company or marketing team today, untangling your content supply chain needs to be a top priority. The following four steps will enable you to efficiently meet growing content demands without increasing your headcount or budget.
1. Create a North Star for content
Straightening out a content supply chain starts with focus, and to that end, Adobe Consulting has found that it helps to have a North Star around content objectives. At Adobe, we rallied our own teams around this concept: “Marketers must be able to plan, create, and optimize impactful, brand-consistent content with efficiency, speed, and scale.”
Creating a North Star requires you to go back to basics and develop a common vocabulary for the entire company around marketing deliverables, roles, and responsibilities. Without an agreed-upon taxonomy for concepts such as “campaign,” it’s impossible to reinvent workflows and meet the multiplying need for more marketing content.
2. Develop content commandments
As a function, marketing is a team sport and any team that wants to win needs to make a set of commitments. We came up with eight “content commandments” that speak to the organizational realities of content marketing processes within a large enterprise:
Agency management. Commit to having a finite set of brand-trained agencies with centralized oversight and management.
Content quality. Content must adhere to brand and legal standards and drive business impact.
Speed. Content can be created, deployed, and optimized at the speed of business.
Efficiency. Content should be used across as many surfaces, use cases, and audiences as possible — and ideally be customizable.
Management. Content must be stored centrally and easily discoverable, with usage tracked from the get-go.
Oversight. Agency spending, production costs, types of content, and channels served should have a single, centralized view — enabling impact tracking, budgeting, and future planning.
Development. Require a streamlined process with defined stakeholders and a clear review timeline.
Localization. Content must be built for global impact and near-simultaneous deployment across geographies.
Realistically, content — particularly highly visible content projects such as TV advertising spots — can sometimes descend into the subjective. Technology and data can help. Data insights from martech tools clarify content effectiveness in previous campaigns and forecast the impact of upcoming creative executions. Conversations between CMOs, business units, sales, and finance shouldn’t get bogged down in age-old territorial disputes. But with the right technology, even if they do, they’ll be operating from a baseline of rational measurement.
3. Reimagine your content supply chain with generative AI
As content demands multiply, organizations need a digital experience platform that can shepherd content from ideation to creation, production, and activation. Adobe GenStudio is an integrated, generative AI-powered solution that lets any enterprise supercharge and simplify its content supply chain. Using a simple interface that’s connected to enterprise data and workflows, marketers can rapidly create content with Adobe Firefly generative AI and Adobe Express, then enable reuse through a single enterprise portal that encompasses Adobe Workfront, Adobe Experience Manager, and Adobe Creative Cloud. They can easily activate content across channels and immediately gain content performance insights through Adobe Experience Cloud — critical to delivering more personalized, high-impact content to customers.
Adobe believes generative AI is critical to solving content supply chain challenges, enabling organizations to achieve unparalleled speed and scale at lower costs. As leaders, we need to prepare our teams across marketing and creative for a future where generative AI is part of our everyday jobs. The goal is to move from manual processes to an AI-enabled world where creatives and marketers have AI copilots for their work and manual, mundane, and repetitive tasks will be automated.
Brands can move from a scarcity of content creators to a new normal where anyone in a company can easily and safely create on-brand content and from today’s black box state of content creation and investment to a process with transparent investments in tools that are trusted and enterprise-safe.
4. Adopt tools that empower everyone to deliver and manage content
At Adobe we know the hundreds of thousands of marketing assets in play today will grow to over 1 million soon, as we deliver the personalized experiences our customers expect across surfaces. In addition to managing these assets, marketers will need to rapidly update a similarly multiplying number of web pages and app listings to meet new trends and seasonal demands.
To help teams keep up, we’ve reimagined Adobe Experience Manager Sites, enabling users across marketing to easily create and update content for their brand’s digital properties using existing tools like Microsoft Word or Google Docs. In addition, authors can test and experiment quickly, so the highest-performing pages make it to market — all based on data. And all underpinned by Adobe Experience Manager technology that has been optimized to deliver lightning-fast page load times.
Adobe is continuing to innovate in collaboration technologies — including Frame.io and Adobe Workfront — that break down the barriers between creative and marketing teams and speed up content review processes and approvals so campaigns can make it to market on time and on budget.
To meet the content demands of modern digital-first enterprises, creative professionals and marketing teams need to see that, as CMOs and marketing leaders, we’re investing in next-generation content and data technology platforms, reimagining our processes, and advocating a responsible embrace of generative AI. This holistic approach will help creative and marketing pros succeed in bringing high-impact campaigns to market and building a portfolio of success for their careers.
Learn how Adobe GenStudio combines generative AI and automation to help you streamline the content supply chain for your business.