Cutting friction in the content supply chain: how to integrate GenAI for marketing

When you think of supply chains, you might think of big industries like energy or manufacturing. You might imagine vast, interconnected, and international webs of commerce that bring us the products we use in our everyday lives. The efficiency of these supply chains can determine profit margins, customer trust, resilience, and ultimately business success itself.

However, with the digital ecommerce revolution taking hold, there’s another supply chain to consider: the enterprise content supply chain. Today, online shopping is increasingly displacing in-person experiences, accelerated by the global pandemic and optimized digital experiences. This has placed the content supply chain front and center.

A recent Adobe study found that 88% of customer experience leaders believe content demand has doubled in the last two years - with nearly two-thirds anticipating that demand to grow fivefold in the next two years. Enterprise content is expected to grow from an estimated 47 exabytes in 2021 to 155 exabytes in 2026.

This soaring demand has placed a new emphasis on the content delivery pipeline: 80% of marketers now say content creation is a top priority. Brands are struggling to achieve personalization at scale and ensure their communications are tailor-made for audiences across touchpoints, channels, and regions. This means they are focussed more and more on the process by which they are made: the supply chain for content.

Unpacking the content supply chain

Like physical supply chains, enterprise content supply chains are multi-faceted, involving different teams, different workspaces, and different disciplines, which all come together to create an asset that’s ready to be consumed. This means there is complexity built into the system.

To take the example of a simple pencil: the raw material of lead has to be mined by a specialized team in one location. The wood to encase it comes from cedar trees which is then processed and shaped in a factory in another location. The rubber for the eraser, typically derived from petroleum, comes from a third specialized source, and all these components are shipped and brought together for assembly in a pencil factory, where they then go through packaging and quality control before they are finally ready to be delivered to consumers. A simple product, with highly complex origins.

Let’s compare this to a simple newsletter: an image is captured by a photographer and edited by a graphic designer in Adobe Photoshop ready to form the header. A data analyst provides the insight for campaign messaging, which is sent to a copywriter, and then to SEO teams and content editors to finalize and optimize. Personalized variants for different audiences are built in another program by another team according to user profiles provided by a third-party service. All this is brought together and orchestrated by a campaign manager before the newsletter is finally ready to send out to consumers. Just like the pencil, it’s a simple product, with highly complex origins.

It’s clear that: today’s content supply chain is often long, costly, and siloed across different teams, tools, and formats. This means businesses are less able to respond to rapidly shifting markets, less able to harness creativity, and less able to scale up their content operations when needed.

This is business critical. Those who fall behind on content velocity open themselves up to potentially existential threats from competitors. Therefore, to deliver more content, brands must address the complexity and inefficiency in their supply chains or risk losing market advantage.

Integrating Generative AI for content velocity

Generative AI (GenAI) technologies have the potential to significantly cut friction, automate granular workflows, and accelerate content delivery.

While marketing, experience, and creative professionals will already be familiar with the powerful tools within Adobe’s Creative Cloud and Experience Cloud, the true potential lies in the seamless integration of these platforms with inbuilt AI capabilities. For example:

The integration of these powerful tools unlocks a wealth of potential for content velocity and personalization at scale. Adobe’s Content Supply Chain solution enables marketers to harness the power of connected platforms to attain a refined content strategy and deliver customer-centric journeys efficiently and effectively.

A bird’s eye view: GenAI across the marketing operations lifecycle

We can think of a traditional marketing operations lifecycle as divided into four stages: planning, building, delivering, and measuring. By choosing the GenAI acceleration highway, there are integrations and opportunities at every stage.

The planning stage

Brands can leverage AI-optimized brainstorming. Getting those first ideas down on the page can be daunting. AI can kickstart the brainstorming process with a set of ideas which can then be enhanced by collaborating and elaborating with help from AI.

75% of marketers say improving alignment and collaboration within the content supply chain is essential for improving customer experience. Thankfully, they can now take advantage of AI documentation generation. Outlining a roadmap for the delivery of a project is essential but can be time-consuming, dull, and inefficient. AI can help summarize intention in the form of easy-to-use documents that help capture messaging and adapt it to different formats. This can be used to generate output such as briefs, objectives, roadmaps, KPIs, and tracking strategies.

The building stage

Over a quarter of marketers say they struggle to customize content for different audiences, creating friction and slowing down delivery. Brands can take advantage of AI content and channel generation. The generative image, video, and text capabilities of AI mean it can envision and build personalized content for you, based on simple prompts or frameworks - from full web design to entire emails to video content.

The delivery stage

Once they reach the delivery stage, modern brands can harness AI variations and journey generation. This means content can be recycled automatically and almost endlessly. AI can be trained on automated A/B testing which builds rules around user preferences, from which a campaign can be multiplied and customized for a high volume of target groups.

The measuring stage

A third of marketers say they struggle to measure the impact of their content on their audience. Now, organizations can harness AI performance and optimization to analyze bigger data sets than ever before, across a range of sources, in real-time. This can help to spot new patterns, and different trends and use generative storytelling to automatically translate those findings into insights that every stakeholder will understand and find compelling.

Introducing Adobe GenStudio

Many brands are aware of the market advantage GenAI brings: it has the potential to add the equivalent of anywhere from $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion to the global economy - through productivity increases, time and money savings, and innovation.

However, most remain uncertain about how to integrate it into their content supply chain in a commercially safe way that provides quick wins and reduces risk. Enter Adobe GenStudio: Adobe’s solution for a more simplified and efficient content supply chain.

It enables marketers to:

All this, whilst continuing to use applications they already work with for a ‘plug and go’ asset delivery experience. Indeed, Adobe’s ‘State of Work’ report tells us that almost a third of marketers cite collaboration across departments as the main friction point when optimizing customer experience.

Adobe GenStudio seamlessly integrates into Adobe’s Creative Cloud, Adobe Firefly, AEM Assets and Sites, Adobe Journey Optimizer, Adobe Workfront, and Frame.io. By merging rapid creative ideation with advanced activation capabilities, it empowers brands to collaborate across business areas and effortlessly distribute captivating content across all channels.

Level up content creation with generative AI marketing tools

The transformative impact of AI on the corporate landscape is not a new concept. Marketers today face a wave of information and noise about its dangers, risks, and opportunities. The key here is to start small and targeted, calculating where Generative AI can bring trackable, tangible improvements to productivity and your brand’s bottom line based on data-driven insight.
This might mean, in the first instance, taking advantage of Adobe GenStudio for versioning existing content for multiple channels - to free up marketing capabilities for creative and strategic planning. It could also mean applying AI to intelligently automate governance and brand standard checks on new assets, cutting the delivery time of a suite of new video assets.
We’ve explored the vast potential of AI, which is more accessible than ever with Adobe's suite of tools. The future of AI in marketing is brighter than ever. The power to streamline, optimize

To delve deeper into the marketing capabilities of AI, we invite you to download our latest whitepaper ‘Marketing in the age of GenAI: a playbook for leadership’. This resource will provide you with invaluable insights and strategies to empower your brand, enhance digital marketing efforts, and maintain brand consistency in this age of rapid content creation and distribution.

Get in touch with our marketing and AI experts today to learn more.

Let's talk
tag
Industry Benchmark
style
dark-plum