What if you could manufacture opportunity?
This is not to ask what if you could manufacture campaigns. Instead, this is to ask if we could think about manufacturing opportunity the same way we might think about manufacturing a jar of pickles? Simply: Yes. If the ask is to manufacture opportunity for the purpose of profitable growth, a supply chain dedicated to the creation and optimization of content that acts as the fuel for engagement can and should be established.
Today, the complex web of functions, talent, tools and processes attached to content creation has left organizations with nothing less than chaos. This web is a bottleneck that brings our system to manufacture opportunity to a screeching halt.
What is Supply Chain Management, and How Does it Apply to Content?
Let’s talk about pickles. To meet market demand, you sell 100 jars each month so, you order enough cucumbers to make 100 jars for the month of June. But the lid manufacturer can only supply 90 lids for June. Without visibility and automation in the supply chain, you are still ordering ingredients, making pickles, and filling 100 jars, wasting the 10 with no lids. Making this worse, you already took orders for all 100 jars and now 10 customers are out of luck. No pickles for them.
A supply chain strategy is a plan to manage how goods and services are made and delivered. This encompasses everything from raw materials to final delivery, detailing the people, platforms and processes that are required. Supply Chain Management (SCM) typically breaks down into coordination, planning, execution, delivery and monitoring. These phases commonly involve key actions in sourcing, procurement, logistics management, quality assurance and delivery as SCM technologies and workflows aim to optimize efficiencies across the entire chain measuring efficiency, productivity and opportunity for continuous improvement.
Demand signals, past performance, supplier availability of each component to the finished delivered product all play a part in getting your 100 bottles into the hands of your loyal customers. SCM intentionally predicts, orchestrates and optimizes each stage of production, execution and delivery to ensure that every element is rightsized and in lock step with all other stages.
Now: close your eyes and imagine that instead of pickles, we were talking about content. Instead of talking about profit from selling pickles, we were talking about opportunity that is driven from a customer’s journey and their engagement with content.
What Should a Content Supply Chain Really Address?
The purpose of a content supply chain is NOT to make more content faster. It is to generate the right content for the right audience or customer in the right moment. In the earlier example of our pickle business, the end goal of an optimally managed supply chain is not to make more pickles faster. Instead, it works to get the right jar of pickles into the right customer hands to meet an immediate craving and need in the right moment. Miss that window, you risk missing that sale.
Through this same lens, if we are working to make content, there needs to be an end business goal that answers the question of WHY are we doing this to begin with. We produce content so that we can manufacture opportunity and growth thanks to engagement.
If we only focus on automating the process of content operations, we only get more of the same content, produced faster. When we add Artificial Intelligence (specifically generative AI) to the mix, we get more versions of content, produced faster. However, if we focus on how we use content to manufacture opportunity, our processes, our outcomes and the technology we leverage is set to a different purpose. Instead of churning assets quickly, our gaze turns to prediction, context and timing of content production and delivery orchestration.
This is not to say that there is not intense pressure on marketing teams to create more forms of more content. This pressure has pushed the boundaries of the content development team to deputize functions and personas well outside the formal engagement center of marketing, conscripting them into this content development and deployment team.
These informal engagement hubs have often turned to rogue, self-selected tools that may produce content or assets quickly, but fail to connect to centralized common brand assets or templates. These teams are asked to be part of the machine that is manufacturing opportunity, but they are not included in the tools or platforms that could allow for brand secure creation.
The content supply chain requires specific shared services that include common data, common asset repositories and visibility across what exists in the creative world of possible. With guidelines and guardrails set across the organization, the supply chain allows for creative centralization that is built from collaborative briefs and a collective understanding of the brand and the customer.
Visibility, accountability and analytics are supported by truly digitally connected systems and tools. The data and analytics that flow across this content supply chain should not just curate and elevate insights and recommendations for optimized actions. An AI-powered content supply chain should have the capacity to reason and take action based on known factors from brand standards, allowable use guidelines, market conditions, and even current events. Predictability and scalability across the supply chain is not thanks to the speed of automating creativity, but rather thanks to the speed of identifying outliers and predicting needs to perfectly pace production, resources and collaboration. The beauty of a supply chain strategy is in the dichotomy of it all: a content supply chain should be structured to empower flexibility.
Just like with pickles, tastes for content will change. The content supply chain will allow for change. Spicy pickles could be all the rage today but fall out of favor tomorrow as sweet pickles take over. Similarly, image personalization are table steaks in today’s engagement strategies, but just like that video could be the only game in town.
Is your organization ready to manufacture opportunity?
If the answer is yes, start by mapping the stages and phases that touch. Work backwards to identify where along that process content can and should be created, individualized and contextualized to deliver a more personalized engagement with the customer. Identify where signal, telemetry and data can be curated to fuel predictive outcomes. Then, do this exercise all over again, but bring in different entry points for the customer’s journey that extend across the organization. Sales, service, finance, commerce, in-store, and even events should be thought of as part of this process to manufacture opportunity…and in turn should be accounted for across the content supply chain.
The content supply chain will continue to evolve as a strategy just like the technology stack will evolve as technologies evolve. While there won’t be a single “content supply chain stack” there will be core tools and core platforms that will connect into a larger engagement and opportunity ecosystem. Think of solutions like Adobe GenStudio and Adobe Express with all of their generative AI and content creation power connecting into larger CRM and Service solutions like ServiceNow or Cloud platforms like AWS or Microsoft to bring all that interaction and engagement together with the customer and with all those content attributes into a trusted single truth.
The content supply chain will integrate and connect far beyond Marketing and creative teams. It will account for and deliver right-sized tools across the organization and connect everyone into this overarching supply chain that manufactures durable, profitable growth, even for a pickle manufacturer that only sells 100 jars a month.
Image is AI generated using Adobe Firefly. No pandas were asked to pack pickles for this image.
