Content supply chains are slow and complicated. Amit Ahuja from Adobe explores how generative AI can alleviate these issues.
The content landscape is changing rapidly. Demand for content to drive personalised experiences is skyrocketing, doubling in the past two years. It is projected to grow by at least five times over the next two years.
Adobe works with a global entertainment company that manages and updates more than a million assets, including high-resolution video content. Another premium automotive brand showcases 13 million assets online for its used car business. That is the scale of content portfolios for digital-first brands.
At the same time, most budgets and teams aren’t getting bigger, straining content developers and marketers to their limits. High-functioning content supply chains are key to producing the breadth of content required to meet customers where they are with effective experiences. However, most brands’ content operations are a tangle of inefficient processes and disconnected applications that simply can’t keep up. With customer relationships on the line, organisations in every industry must get their content supply chains in order.
Fortunately, a new generation of technologies – infused with generative AI – can help companies bring together people, tools and workflows to create and deliver more of the right content at the speed and scale of customer expectations.
A comprehensive approach to addressing content supply chain issues
Most brands’ content creation-to-activation cycles involve weeks of time and dozens of manual handoffs to deliver everything from a web page to a marketing campaign. Creative and marketing teams must endure clumsy collaboration and approval processes across brief writing, creative ideation, content production, reversioning channel activation and analytics and reporting.
There are four distinct areas brands must address to build a high-functioning content supply chain that supports organisational objectives:
- Planning and workflow. Streamline and orchestrate work with enterprise content workflow that simplify reviews and approvals, optimise spend and resources, enhance visibility of capacity, projects, risks and timelines and automate downstream processes like storage and tagging.
- Creative productivity. Supercharge creative teams by ensuring they can quickly access existing assets to inform new content creation. Save creative professionals time with generative AI-powered tools for ideation, concepting and editing. And automate the production of derivative assets.
- Marketing agility. Scale marketing impact by arming teams with generative AI-powered tools that allow them to localise campaigns while keeping them on-brand, remix existing content without studio support and swiftly generate content for rapid-response campaigns.
- Activation and analytics. Deliver better customer experiences and campaign performance by enabling teams to easily experiment with copy, image and channel variations. Measure content performance to enable continuous optimisation.
Safe and responsible content
Like all transformational technologies, generative AI comes with both promise and concerns. Brands must ensure used tools are commercially safe and that AI-generated content does not infringe on existing copyrights or contain harmful or biased information. Vendors must have enterprise-grade data policies and governance in place to ensure employee and customer information is handled properly. Brands should look for trusted partners who can provide both world-class solutions and have strong AI ethics processes to ensure the technology can be used with confidence.
Walking the walk
As a global organisation with multiple business units, regional offices, creative studios and marketing teams, Adobe’s own content supply chain is complex and can be hard to manage. Using our own GenStudio content supply chain solution, our web team alone has been able to streamline operations and gain significant efficiencies. For example, they centralised 10 different Digital Asset Management systems into a single source of truth for campaigns with enhanced governance, accelerated time to market for major digital promotions and activations, and automated a variety of manual tasks. As a result, the team has been able to increase the speed of promotional plan development by 97 percent, while decreasing time spent packaging content by 83 percent and time spent activating content by 88 percent.
A step-change to personalisation
Technologies that facilitate collaboration, connect systems and data and automate mundane tasks are helping organisations around the world create amazing content. In turn, this allows them to deliver customer experiences that feel more personal and impactful than ever before.
Generative AI brings another step change to brands’ content supply chains, enabling more people to create on-brand assets—while at the same time, giving creative teams back time to make the kind of differentiated content that elevates customer interactions to truly memorable experiences.
Amit Ahuja is senior vice president of products, digital experience at Adobe.
Image attributed to Amit Ahuja and Airfocus via Unsplash.
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