How CMOs can leverage the full potential of creative

Developing content in this modern age requires new skill sets: creative, strategic and technical. Creators need to understand the full end-to-end process from creative development to activation, and how data and technology can be utilized to improve the speed and quality of their work.

However, finding the right talent is a challenge, with 92% of creative and marketing managers facing hurdles finding candidates with the necessary skills.⁴ Depending on their access to creative talent, we see organizations taking different approaches.

One observable trend is organizations are centralizing their creative talent to maximize the impact of scarce resources and generate operational efficiencies. Creating a shared service model improves collaboration, communication and brand consistency, while driving economies of scale. Another benefit of centralizing creative is improved retention of creative resources by offering clear and deeper creative career paths. Once centralized, companies are organizing differently.

One common approach is to leverage agile pods to maintain dedicated leadership roles (e.g., senior art director) while team members exist in a shared pool for resourcing across campaigns or initiatives. The pod structure allows creative teams the flexibility to meet increasing and dynamic business needs by blending cross-functional skill sets (digital and traditional). Once these changes are in place, we see clients then identifying the creative activities to bring in house to reduce dependencies on external partners/agencies and drive agility, better integrate with channels and reduce costs.

As an example, Anheuser-Busch InBev built its in house creative agency named DraftLine to be more agile and leverage data-driven insights to produce more localized and personalized creatives.⁵ In 2022, AB InBev achieved its “highest-ever” volume sales and strong performance of its premium portfolio, attributing part of this success to the effectiveness of their in-house creative agency.⁶

Similarly, Procter & Gamble moved part of its creative activities to in-house departments and generated significant savings in agency fees and ad production costs.⁷ Some argue that brands can create better and more engaging content via internal creative units given the proximity to the business and a strong understanding of the brand.

Through many engagements supporting our Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG), Telecom, Media and Technology (TMT) and retail clients on centralization efforts, we realize there is no “one-size-fits-all,” and companies are organizing themselves in multiple ways to manage growing creative needs. As an example, some are reorganizing and restructuring around channels, while others are aligned to products, customer segments or pursuing a hybrid model.

Global online content consumption increased by 50% in 2020,⁸ putting additional pressures on creative teams. Two forces are driving this consumption increase:

Proliferation of platforms

 With different content specifications, adapting content to multiple platforms/channels is no small task. Although some changes may be minor and easily completed manually, edits can become tedious and time-consuming as the number of platforms grows. In other cases, channels can have completely different audiences, requiring different creative talent or a different creative briefing.

Personalization at scale

Consumers now expect content to be relevant and contextualized to them, pressuring brands to adopt tailored content strategies. Personalization also includes elements like localization, translation and market adaptations. For example, a CPG brand could use different creative assets to reach micro segments around health-conscious customers, or budget-friendly parents. Some brands go as far as creating content that is adapted to a customers’ purchase history or geo-location.

The proliferation of platforms and the personalization at scale often results in a lot of manual and repetitive steps to create, review, approve, tag and store content. To address this challenge, many organizations are adopting or upgrading technology to streamline the process and infuse more automation. Technology is playing a critical role in delivering creative at the scale and speed expected by consumers and required to remain relevant and competitive.

Sample technology tools include:

• Workflow tools. Using automation in creative workflows will help improve speed to market by streamlining handoffs, reducing the number of manual tools and expediting reviews and approvals. Tools like Adobe Workfront are specifically designed to improve project and portfolio management across teams, and automation is constantly introduced in the tool to connect with Adobe’s creative cloud suite and streamline the overall creative process (e.g., project templates, review stages, campaign briefs, task prioritization).

• Data asset management tool. Many organizations experience “content wastage,” meaning that creative assets are created and are not or barely used. Intelligent tagging and data cleansing will enable organization to quickly reuse content across earned/paid/owned media. cloud-native digital asset management (DAM), Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) assets, uses smart tags to organize digital content and centralize all assets in a single hub.

• GenAI. With the continued acceleration of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), there is more opportunity to drive further benefits. The obvious applications of GenAI include the ability to generate new marketing content, including text (e.g., email copy, blog posts), images (e.g., static ads, dynamic product visuals) and even audio-video content (e.g., localized promos). GenAI can also be deployed to review content against brand guidelines or rules, and even perform a first round of legal reviews. For example, Klarna, a Swedish fintech company, has leveraged AI for image production, reducing over $6m in costs despite running more campaigns and updating marketing collateral more frequently.⁸

In addition to net new generative use cases, organizations may also look to use GenAI to augment their manual editing and tagging workflows. In our work with a major media and entertainment company, we are maximizing how marketing teams can generate multiple marketing assets from a source asset efficiently and altering content for new delivery platforms (e.g., taking a static ad and altering the aspect ratio, resolution and graphics).

GenAI can help reduce the cost and time associated with personalizing content for specific audiences or personas and makes true personalization a reality. The potential benefits include speed to market, reduced cost, increased capacity for creative resources, faster testing and iteration, better return on investment and performance. A Gartner study revealed that more than half of marketers polled are already capitalizing on these benefits, with GenAI being partially integrated in their marketing processes (55%).¹⁰

Of course, applying more advanced technology like GenAI does not come without elements of risk or consideration. The largest considerations are around the use of data in the underlying models and the need for human oversight to help ensure output quality and to provide feedback to the models. With the risk that large language models (LLMs) may hallucinate, or make up information that is untrue, humans must review all creative outputs before launching them in the market.

Organizations must also work to ensure the underlying assets being leveraged are properly cleared for use and have the proper rights and talent approvals. In addition, intellectual property (IP) must be carefully considered as part of the tool selection if using a third-party solution. Brands need to ensure companies providing GenAI solutions will not train on any inputs or outputs generated and that data will be deleted following the scope of the partnership or license agreements. Furthermore, AI models should be trained against brand guidelines and standards, in addition to accounting for compliance and regulatory requirements.

With organizations struggling to find candidates with the necessary skills, we see many CMOs leveraging external partners or creators (including consumers) to improve capabilities, generate new ideas, tap into specific expertise and increase capacity. In fact, even if more than 80% of companies surveyed now claim to have in-house agencies,¹¹ most of them still partner with external agencies and creative talent.

Creative talent

Several brands partner with creative talent, and results can be impressive. For example, Quiz, a global fashion brand, worked with micro- and macro-influencers in their new social media strategy. Taking advantage of the various audiences the influencers were able to reach, Quiz was able to increase their average order value by 23%, their conversion rates by 254% and time on site by 276%.¹² In addition to being effective, creative talent enables brands to jump quickly on social trends as they can turn around content as quickly as three or four days. In fact, eMarketer finds that flexibility, agility and strong connection with audiences has made influencer marketing spending even more resilient to economic pressures.¹³ To increase effectiveness of influencer campaigns, leading-class brands involve content creators early in the campaign brief, and use them as a “research team” on the content their audience wants to see. They also repurpose influencer content, with some reusing the content in 50% of their brand campaigns, including on non-social platforms.

Specialized agencies

Brands are also collaborating with specialized agencies (e.g., digital, social, influencer) to create original and new content. These agencies typically provide a “white glove” experience and can support the end-to-end creative process. These specialized agencies help find influencers that will create content aligned to the brand, making it feel more authentic. Some of them even leverage AI to help assess an influencer’s fit with the brand (e.g., use image recognition to find influencers that organically consume the brand’s products, or assess tone of voice affinity with customer base). Additionally, these agencies use trend analysis and social listening tools to quickly identify trends, informing content that influencers and brands can create.

User-generated content

There is no better way to engage and create lasting loyalty with customers than by leveraging the content they create. User-generated content (UGC) is a powerful tool that allows brands to authentically connect with their audience. When a brand takes the initiative to re-share or promote UGC, it sends a strong message to consumers that their voices matter. This recognition makes them feel valued, fostering a deeper emotional connection with the brand. Additionally, the authenticity and objectivity of UGC resonate with other consumers, helping them build trust and confidence in the brand. By amplifying the voices of real customers, brands not only enhance their credibility but also cultivate a community of loyal advocates who are more likely to engage, share and support the brand in the long term. More than 86% of companies today use UGC as part of their marketing strategy.¹⁴ And when users create and share content on social media channels, they get 28% higher engagement compared to standard company posts.¹⁵

A successful creative team relies on a vast network of individuals and partner organizations. With the right internal and external operating model, the power of internal teams can be expanded or amplified by tapping into agencies and the broader creative network.

As content becomes such a critical differentiator, the design and content creation function is being elevated to its full strategic potential, and companies need support in defining the right vision, capabilities and operating model to drive growth. This enables companies to become more agile by using automation, collaborating openly and quickly with streamlined workflows and leveraging the optimal tech stack to create, organize, store, share and activate content assets at scale.

Special thanks to Sarah Russo, Senior Consultant, Ernst & Young LLP, for contributions to this content.