The content boom: budgets up, volume surging, AI leading the charge

Content production is accelerating at a pace that’s outstripping expectations, fueled by expanding channels and AI innovations:

• Rising budgets: Over 80% of organizations plan to increase content and creative budgets in the near future, up from 70% in 2024. Notably, 29% expect significant increases, a jump from 19% in 2023.
• Volume explosion: 82% of teams reported higher content output last year, with 27% seeing significant growth. AI is the primary driver, with 75% of professionals saying it has boosted volume—30% significantly.
• Evolving ROI metrics: Success is measured through a mix of engagement (40%), brand awareness (38%), conversions/lead gen (38%), and sales revenue (38%). ROI is improving, with 28% reporting significant gains (up from 19% last year).

Teams with mature workflows are reaping the rewards, being 3x more likely to see substantial ROI. This underscores the need for investments in AI, automation, and centralized systems to handle the surge without sacrificing quality.

Content operations: maturity matters, fragmentation hurts

Operational challenges persist, but top performers are addressing them head-on. Canto’s report highlights persistent pain points like keeping up with content demands (40%) and managing volume (36%), but also shows progress in tech adoption.

• Workflow maturity: Only 43% have advanced, standardized workflows, but these teams report 48% significant ROI increases compared to 0% for those with ad-hoc processes.
• Improvement tactics: 51% are using AI for creation, tagging, and organization; 41% are enhancing cross-team collaboration; and 36% are introducing automation to cut manual work.
• AI’s role in efficiency: Widespread AI users find maintaining brand consistency extremely easy (49% vs. 6-9% for non-users).

High-ROI teams prioritize automation (47%), templates (45%), and asset distribution (33%), proving that streamlining operations directly boosts returns.

Digital Asset Management: centralization is key to avoiding chaos

Fragmented asset storage, a persistent problem, remains a major drag, with most teams using multiple systems like cloud storage (62%) and DAM solutions (47%). The consequences are clear:

Only 35% are very confident employees use up-to-date brand assets, meaning most perceive that colleagues in sales, product management, customer service and the broader marketing team are using dated, often inaccurate materials which exposes their brands to numerous risks.

In contrast, DAM users report smoother operations, and those unifying assets with product content see 4x higher ROI gains.

For product-focused teams, accuracy is critical: 88% struggle with consistency across channels, but centralized approaches reduce duplication and improve access.

Tech stack optimization: closing gaps for better scale

Content teams lose time on manual tasks, with 22% prioritizing AI automation and 21% better search/retrieval. Core capabilities like analytics (43%) and standardized workflows (41%) are established in many organizations, but only 24% have fully optimized stacks.

Teams with strong ROI excel in AI tools (59%), analytics (50%), and automated tagging (42%). As stacks mature, expect more focus on integration to eliminate silos.

AI throughout the lifecycle: from analysis to personalization

AI is embedded across operations, with top uses in performance analysis (41%), SEO optimization (40%), and tagging (39%). High-ROI teams apply it more broadly, especially in personalization (41%) and discovery (43%).

Looking ahead, teams want AI for streamlining reviews (38%), smart search (36%), and reuse recommendations (35%). Adoption is at 77%, with 81% confident in AI’s accuracy for tagging—higher among heavy users.

What this means for your marketing strategy

The report paints a clear picture: success in 2026 hinges on operational maturity. Fragmented systems fuel burnout, waste and magnify risks, while AI-driven, centralized approaches unlock speed, consistency, and ROI. If your team is stuck in manual workflows or siloed assets, now’s the time to audit and optimize.

I help businesses in Tasmania and beyond implement these strategies— from AI integration to DAM setups. If you’re ready to scale your content operations, let’s talk. Download the full Canto report here to dive deeper. Let’s turn these insights into action for your business.

Scott and his Martech Tribe colleague Frans Riemersma now have created a dedicated platform to assist marketers filter and navigate through their subcategories and options.

They have also produced a comprehensive assessment of AI’s impact on the Martech universe. Despite (and maybe also because of) its 111-page length, Martech for 2025 is well worth reviewing.

As marketers navigate this dynamic era, the report highlights five key segments driving growth and innovation, alongside practical strategies for leveraging AI effectively.

AI-Powered Martech Growth

The surge in Martech tools, which have jumped from 11,038 in 2023 to 15,385 in 2025, shows no sign of slowing down. The growth is largely fueled by AI-powered solutions. These are categorized into five segments:

1. Indie Tools: Specialized, AI-native startups focusing on niche marketing tasks like content creation and sales automation.
2. Incumbent Platforms: Established players (e.g., Adobe, Salesforce) embedding AI to enhance existing products.
3. Challenger Platforms: Emerging platforms leveraging AI to disrupt traditional categories, such as digital experience platforms (DXPs), formerly CMS tools or website Content Management Systems.
4. Instant Software: Custom, AI-generated software created on-the-fly to address specific business needs. Salesforce, recognising an emerging commercial threat, is proactively warning against this approach, labelling it DIY AI software.
5. Service-as-a-Software: AI-driven solutions that perform tasks autonomously, like customer service or campaign orchestration, often with outcome-based pricing.

Foundations for an AI Strategy

The report reinforces the essential reality that a robust AI strategy hinges on a solid data foundation. Scott and Fran emphasize the importance of a universal data layer. 71% of those who responded to a survey for the report claimed to be using cloud data warehouses (e.g., Snowflake, Google BigQuery) to integrate data across their stacks. Additionally, a universal content layer is emerging to manage personalized content at scale, blending customer data with brand identity for hyper-personalized experiences. API composability is also critical, enabling AI agents to execute actions via large action models (LAMs), which complement large language models (LLMs).

This data challenge is the biggest AI-adoption hurdle for traditional legacy businesses, who, with few exceptions, are yet to genuinely master their myriad data management issues.

Generative AI Use Cases

Generative AI adoption is widespread, with content ideation (69%) and content copy production (62%) leading as the most popular use cases given their obvious low-hanging fruit status. Other notable applications include transcription, summarization, and competitive research. While content and data-related tasks dominate, adoption in advertising and social media is lower, partly due to outsourcing or reliance on platforms like Google’s Performance Max. The report notes that 60% of marketers use both embedded AI in existing tools and new AI-native tools, with frequent use in content and analytics tasks.

Governance and Practical Insights

Only 52% of organizations have a generative AI policy, impacting adoption rates. Those with policies are more likely to cite cost as a reason for discontinuing AI tools, indicating greater maturity in evaluating ROI. The report also highlights the need for governance to address data privacy, security, and compliance concerns.

Key Takeaways

• Experiment Strategically: Start small with AI to test high-impact use cases without overhauling existing systems.
• Prioritize Data: A strong data strategy is essential for unlocking AI’s potential. There is little merit in feeding sophisticated AI engines with poor-quality data fuel.
• Embrace Composability: Build flexible, API-driven stacks to integrate AI seamlessly.
• Focus on Outcomes: Shift from flashy demos to measurable ROI, leveraging AI for efficiency and personalization.

As AI continues to evolve, marketers must balance innovation with governance to harness its transformative power. For a deeper dive, explore the full “Martech for 2025” report.

Unfortunately, just 28% of respondents reported having achieved their objectives in the current survey. That’s not good enough. The case for incremental improvement has never been weaker than it is today with the pandemic disrupting our business world forever. Those that not only survive but thrive will be orchestrating leaps forward in the coming months and years, with marketing in the lead.

Thanks to the pandemic we are all moving rapidly to a digital world, where business, especially business-to-business activity, happens wherever people are.

Businesses who did not have their digital platform acts together were especially vulnerable during the pandemic-stricken 2020. They struggled to facilitate online commerce efficiently and with the ease. Their vision,  leadership, data, people, process and system silos and deficiencies were exposed by the transparent front door that is their web presence.

Critically, today’s B2B customers know what good looks like thanks to their own personal commerce experiences with the leading B2C brands. In 2021 all B2B players, must fast forward their digitisation ambitions with their marketers playing decisive roles. 

Today, no matter what industry you are in, it’s not enough to simply promote your brand and make, market and sell a product or service. You need a digital community marketplace. An integrated, self-service, collaboration environment (web + commerce + marketing automation + CRM + analytics and ERP) where you customers interact, buy (ideally, subscribe), share, engage and learn from one another. 

In this transformational climate, now, more than ever, we marketers must step up and lead. Marketers have to exercise genuine customer-focused influence and advocacy both horizontally and vertically across their organisations.

It means, for example, embracing service, supply chain and transaction management as the new marketing. There is little value in assembling and advertising blue sky brand promises if your supply chain is not close to best in class, if your customer service team is an island and your ERP landscape is a patchwork of dinosaur legacy systems with 20th century DNA. 

The Green Hat report highlights, the despite progress on many fronts, marketing must speed up.

Critics rightly say Share of Voice has today been overwhelmed by the diversity and complexity of our digital media landscape. It is no longer a credible metric.

Effectiveness guru Les Binet defines SOS as the share of organic Google search queries (not paid search). The metric equates to the total searches for a specific brand, divided by the total searches for all brands in the category. This info can be extracted from Google Trends and goes back to 2004.

In brief, why not measure how many people are searching online for the different brands in your category and compare that number instead?

Says Les Binet, who is head of effectiveness at the UK agency adam&eveDDB: “over the past 30 years, I’ve found that the relationship between tracking metrics and actual purchase behaviour is often surprisingly weak. By tracking Share of Search we have a powerful, not to mention cheap, metric to measure what people are actually doing online, rather than what they say they are doing. It is by no means a silver bullet – the data needs to be interpreted with care and researchers need more detail to be able to apply this to the real world … without doubt though, Share of Search has enormous potential and predictive power to track brands and advertising going forward.”

Janet Hull OBE, founder of EffWorks Global and IPA director of marketing strategy is reported on the webstie of the UK-based IPA (the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising) as saying: “We are delighted that Les has unpacked his exciting new findings with our cross-industry EffWorks audience. At a time when Covid-19 is pushing more consumers online, and while industry budgets are more strained than ever, we very much welcome the addition of Share of Search as a cost-effective, predictor of the health and potential wealth of brands and advertising. In the right hands, with the right learning, this could be a real game changer”.

Check out Les Binet’s October 2020 presentation on the topic: https://vimeo.com/465319431

As most professionals know, dashboards are visualization tools used to communicate actionable information. Governments do appear to have them, in various iterations, but are they being effectively utilized, dynamically reflecting real-time data and transparently available to their citizens?

Seeing our leaders, from the Victorian State Premier, Daniel Andrews, here in Australia, to the UK’s Boris Johnson and the United States’ Donald Trump, repeatedly stand at their podiums with their paper notes, and little else, I cannot help but wonder are these guys analogue leaders adrift in our digital age?

#dashboards

According to Forrester Research close to half of all CRM projects end in failure, usually in the form of a slow death of a thousand reluctant users.

The business case KPIs, built around new customer acquisition, retention and revenue growth, are never realized. And the blame game spirals in all directions.

Change management and training are recognized as essential drivers, but all too often they are starved of resources and focus. Here’s a tip: for every $ spent on the software’s annual subscription, commit $3 to change and training. And, of course, management has to lead by example.

McKinsey’s global C-suite survey says legacy companies are facing “a major hit on revenue and profits”. And a joint KPMG-Egon Zehnder report focused on the automotive industry describes its transformation efforts as being “painfully slow”, and limited to superficial factors such as CEOs appearing at new model launches in jeans and locating innovation divisions in hip cities such as Berlin.

These consultants would say this, of course. Surveys such as these are classic tools to illustrate issues and drum up interest in the solutions these firms offer. Nevertheless, it is hard to argue with the conclusions.

The car industry “seems to be clinging to its old ways,” according to the KPMG-Egon Zehnder researchers, who surveyed more than 500 global industry executives. “Leaders recognize the unprecedented challenge now facing them but have yet to establish the digital‐ready culture needed to meet it.”

McKinsey says digitization is having a significant negative impact on the profits of incumbents through two loop effects: digital entrants competing with incumbents through disruptive models, and incumbents responding to disruption and creating more intense competition with each other.

 “While 90% of companies indicated that they are engaged in some form of digitization, only 16% said their companies have responded with a bold strategy and at scale. Likewise, only 30% of companies are focusing on new ways to bundle demand or re-segment their market. The good news is if your company has yet to fully and adequately engage with digital disruption or has begun going down a path that is not yielding positive results, it’s not alone. Thus, leaders in most industries still have a window for putting a bold digital strategy in place. But it may not stay open long.”

The KPMG-Egon Zehnder report says that automotive “leaders clearly perceive a new force pulling the automotive industry towards unfamiliar ground – we call this force ‘digital gravity. But the industry seems to be clinging to its old ways. Our research has found that despite an awareness of the challenge facing it, the automotive industry has still not undertaken the work that will enable it to respond to this new force”.

In contrast to the old-school auto firms, Tesla is an obvious, emblematic, game-changing disruptor. You can question Elon Musk’s mercurial behavior, his history of over-promising (will the Tesla Semi happen?), the company’s debt burden, the cult-like hype from the fans, and whether the business will become a global high-volume player with a fully autonomous fleet of “robotaxis“, but Tesla is leading the electric vehicle revolution. Its legacy rivals have only recently started acknowledging that the internal combustion engine (ICE) has entered the twilight zone.

And whilst the technology story is compelling, what is also remarkable is that the holistic Tesla experience is a genuine differentiator. For example, unlike the traditional industry, prices are fixed. Influential automotive journalists who buy Tesla cars comment that they are refused discounts. Everybody pays the same in-market price (although Tesla’s pricing can shift, it is universally applied). Picture the peace of mind this statement provides, “nobody has paid less than I did”. No need to engage in the games the conventional car dealers, their financiers and distributors play, with deceptive tactics such as low-interest finance deals still common.

The Internet is awash with positive Tesla stories (and some negatives, of course). Check out this one from a fan claiming that the true cost of ownership is close to negligible, especially when compared to conventional ICE cars sold and maintained by the old-school legacy auto companies and their dealer networks who must move metal at all costs (including ethics) to stay viable. Of course, the traditional players question if Tesla can remain somewhat pure as it transitions from a premium niche actor to a volume seller. For now, however, the Tesla ownership experience is superior and a significant factor in the building of what has become an iconic global brand without mainstream advertising. As a blogger wrote:

“Tesla does not spend millions of dollars in a traditional ad campaign. They let you and I discuss it, rave about it, hate on it, or rejoice in the spirit of going electric in a Tesla, be the catalyst to a viral and brilliant marketing campaign. At the end of the day, Tesla advertising is free.”

Recently owners told Musk, via Twitter, that they wanted to be able to leave their dogs safely in their cars. So, Tesla delivered an over-the-air update that made available “dog mode”. This news has been amplified online by the Tesla fans, industry analysts and self-appointed YouTube commentators who track the company’s every move. Tesla’s simple 27-second video promoting the feature has had has several million views:

McKinsey summarizes its survey findings by explaining that “taking both the intensity of the response and the degree of integration into account, we find that barely 8% (of companies) have both responded offensively and integrated their digital strategy fully into the corporate strategy. This is a huge missed opportunity: Our analysis suggests that only a successful response that is both bold and integrated fully can yield revenue and profit trajectories that are higher post-digitization than pre-digitization”.

The KPMG-Egon Zehnder report emphasizes the need to “pursue and foster a new culture … at all levels of the organization (not IT alone) – a top-down approach alone will not work.

“Let culture play a major role throughout the organization. Without a spirit of openness, curiosity and learning, companies will struggle to create a blend of the old and the new.

“Leaders must also change their own mindset. These steps are impossible without a serving, inquisitive and humble leadership style that extends to the very top of the organization. Although strong executional direction is still needed, establishing a new culture of openness, curiosity and the power to connect is essential. The spirit of collaborative leadership must prevail – and can ultimately enable an organization to accomplish something new and better.”