Creative Production

If you want AI to be effective, you need a backbone

“Sometimes brands can overcomplicate things. Everyone can benefit from generative AI – some more than others. But fundamentally, you can’t work across 20+ different platforms and expect to be efficient. You need a content creation operational backbone.”

Generative AI has come a long way since the early days, when the quality of content was a genuine and pressing concern. The challenge now has shifted from ‘what can these tools actually do?’, to ‘how do I get the most out of them?’.

The brands unlocking real ROI from generative AI are the ones who have already united their marketing ecosystem around a strong Content Marketing Platform, and who understand the role AI has to play alongside their existing teams and technologies.

“We’re seeing three types of client – those who are scared of the problems AI could create and broadly saying they aren’t ready for it. At the other extreme we see a small number of commentators who say AI will take over, and that brands don’t need agencies or content creation in the way they used to.

In the middle are those who we feel have the right approach – that is, this is a very powerful tool in your toolkit,” states ITG’s Chief Growth Officer, Dan Birks.

So, accepting that AI is a tool and not in itself the answer to every marketing challenge, what’s the real deal when it comes to using AI to improve the quality of your content? Especially while still producing at the speed and scale the market demands?

Essentially, it is a game of two halves – operational AI and generative AI.

“On the operational side is where AI should be hugely beneficial. One good way to think about it is that wherever humans are manually checking against objective rules, these tasks can be supported by AI.

Think about the content creation process. At some point, someone or a group of people needs to review those assets, sign them off, reject them or suggest changes. Checking CTAs, terms, logos, and more – these are all rules, and that’s where AI can help us.” Birks explains.

When it comes to generative AI, Birks explains: “Among the most obvious benefits of generative AI is that it’s giving people a much easier way to create or adapt assets. AI is democratising creative so more people can produce more. But you’ll never see its true potential unless it’s part of a wider, coherent content ecosystem.”

A centre of content balance

This freedom to create does come with a downside. “We’ve got more volume created by different stakeholders, and that leads to greater risk in terms of brand compliance. It’s creating some real challenges for our clients.”

Essentially, without proper oversight, content creation can descend into chaos. Multiple departments and stakeholders using multiple tools, some authorised, some perhaps not – shadow AI is the same challenge as shadow tech, just faster.

Each generating fresh assets, thinking up new ideas, creating new workflows. “Marketers are likely to be using multiple different AI tools. It’s not inconceivable that marketers are going to have access to 20+ different tools. That creates its own inefficiency,” Birks warns.

How you get it all back under control is where the Content Marketing Platform (CMP) comes into play.

A consistent place to brief, manage milestones, manage assets, review and approve content is vital. Birks refers to these platforms, such as ITG’s Storyteq CMP, as the backbone of the operation to which everything else connects, and which can all be enabled by agentic solutions.

With the proliferation of tools available to marketers, it’s vital that backbone has the interoperability to deal with not just today’s innovations, but tomorrow’s too.

That vision for an AI-enabled future is a big reason Storyteq was named by Gartner as a Leader in its Magic Quadrant for CMP and DAM, the only platform worldwide that is a Leader in both categories.

“Systems and humans weren’t perfect before but because of the speed, democratisation and possibilities, AI magnifies either the good or the bad. Get the processes right, build a backbone, then you magnify the good,” Birks claims.

“If each of the AI tools used is automatically adding creative assets into a review and approval process, we should be able to get the best of the generative world – additional volume that’s fast to create but we’ve still got human oversight.

But without the backbone of a CMP, there are some real challenges in managing creative and content consistency. It’s one of the things really holding brands back in getting the benefit from generative AI – the fear of it going wrong.”

Make intelligent content choices

Making it easy to manage volume so that it maintains quality is just one part of the equation. The other isn’t knowing where to start but rather, when to stop.

“Even with AI, we don’t want to be reproducing everything from scratch. If I produced 100 things before, they should be easily accessible in my DAM, avoiding the need to recreate existing content over and over again. We should be able to reuse and adapt, not go back to AI tools to do it all over again in three months’ time.”

It sounds like common sense but marketers under pressure to deliver content volume at speed see a tool that can create a fresh asset in seconds and compare it against time spent sifting through the DAM to see if it already exists.

Leaping on the former is a no brainer, but it’s a short-term solution causing a long-term problem. Endless duplication fills storage, confuses users and wastes time, energy and resources. It’s not just a financial consideration – waste torpedoes your sustainability efforts, too.

In other words, a classic case of ‘just because you can, it doesn’t mean you should’. In Storyteq, for example, the first part of the process is checking to see if a new asset is needed at all.

Birks explains: “When we enter a prompt to create assets, that also triggers our agentic workflow to search our DAM and find out if those assets already exist. It will either come back and advise creating a fresh asset, or point to existing ones with current rights, up-to-date branding and relevant campaign messaging.

“With Storyteq at the centre of the content ecosystem, it enables us to set up and automate the tagging of assets in the most efficient and consistent way, so content can be easily searched using natural language.

The marketer’s job is not to create assets, it’s to utilise the right asset to fulfil the campaign brief or customer need. That’s another way AI can be immensely powerful and transformative for marketers.”

Being able to search for concepts is a game-changer. You don’t have to know exactly what name a particular asset was saved under and hope that whoever uploaded it to the DAM followed the necessary tagging guidelines.

Say you’re thinking of a still image, you can’t remember much about it but you know it included a certain scene – just search for that, and your AI-enabled DAM will find what you’re looking for.

It’s about more than just faster searching – it’s about getting greater value from every piece of content you create by being easily able to find, adapt, and reuse those assets.

Taking this functionality and tying it into the whole content ecosystem, funnelling it through whatever tools teams use best is where it all comes together but again, this body of work still needs something to anchor it to a stable core.

“Sometimes brands can overcomplicate things. Everyone can benefit from generative AI – some more than others. But fundamentally, you can’t work across 20+ different platforms and expect to be efficient. You need a content creation operational backbone,” Birks concludes.