Let’s Skip to the Good Part: AI Is the Answer to Content Production Challenges Right Now

The fact is, brands need to create more content than ever to meet customer expectations and truly personalised digital experiences. Content needs to be highly personalised, localised, fit for the platform, and fast, all while maintaining a high standard. With no brand being exempt from macroeconomic pressures, the challenge to craft beautiful, efficient content—affordably and at scale—is one that every brand is experiencing. Brands need content to be ‘Good, Faster and Better Value’.

For all the headline-grabbing and crystal ball gazing that’s already happening around generative AI, it’s easy to forget that there’s a real solution to these challenges in automation that brands can use right now. We can actually skip to the good part.

Good, Fast, Better Value

The two main challenges for brands are price and speed. We have all heard about the ‘Good, Fast, Better Value’ theory - it’s the holy trinity of outcomes from using tech to power creativity. AI and automation are changing this theory. It allows us to drive efficiency and budgetary gains, so we can focus exclusively on ‘good,’ and that’s all marketers and creatives really want and need to be working on to create personalised content at scale. 

Just imagine a scenario where all your creative and marketing talent is really focused on that creative craft and quality. By using algorithms, you can automate the production and distribution pipeline, which gives back space for talent to focus… sounds good doesn’t it?

Fixing the Fast and the Cheap

With AI and content automation, we are streamlining and bringing agility to the production processes, which technically brings the challenge of bringing cheaper and more efficient content into reality. We developed an API that automates a complex process for a team of 10 editors that brings an efficiency of 60 work days per year. Another API that runs directly on Adobe Experience Manager can update and export social assets in batches without opening Photoshop, so even a non-designer can do it. For another client, we render videos in multiple languages with different CTAs. More than 300 videos in one click, uploaded to the DAM with the correct taxonomy, ready to be dispatched to your market. We can go way faster than before, make more with less, and the best part? It’s all measurable. We’ve been building automation and generative AI directly into our workflows since its inception and now we’re helping our partners to do the same.

Implementing your own machine learning models completely changes the ecosystem again. Using your brand assets as training data unlocks even more possibilities to generate images, copy, social content that is authentic to differentiating the brand. This is a huge game changer when marketers need to produce a lot of assets.

While there are still some very important questions with Open AI around copyright and usage, it can be used now for storyboarding or creating efficiencies in the idea-generation process, freeing time up from the manual creation of visuals. 

Let’s Skip to the Good Part

So let’s now assume a brand has taken advantage of these very real opportunities to allocate money and time for their best talent. What’s possible now?

The obvious upside is that creatives and talent are freed from a certain amount of process and can spend more time on ideas and strategy. Even for talent that’s solely responsible for the execution, their time can now focus on finesse and craft, while automation meets volume. 

Another, less obvious, upside is about how we once again use technology to create better content. It’s about using the data in a true feedback loop to make sure what brands put in front of people is the most relevant and interesting. Brand personalisation evolves from simple A/B testing to infinite variation at speed.

This is made easier because generative AI and automation allow us to amplify brand personalisation more than ever. It helps you personalise content anywhere in your customer journey and anywhere in your pipeline, which drives engagement and conversions. The short-term outcomes for marketers mean new insights and better information to act on because brand personalisation can now happen at the scale of tens of millions.

Ultimately, what’s holding marketers back from this is education. This technological shift can often feel as overwhelming as the challenge of fulfilling consumers’ content needs, but automation and AI are solutions now, not the future.