How Content Almost Broke Me In 2023
And Why It Has To Change In 2024
Gotta find a way through the wall of content.
A few weeks back we launched 30 new creatives in an ad account. A small team had been working on these creatives for weeks, new video and photo shoots, design work, animation, the works. We put about as much time as a small team with multiple responsibilities beyond content possibly could.
When we pushed play on this new suite of ad creatives…27 of the 30 failed pretty much right out the gate. They saw nearly $0 in delivery. The other 3 ads are on pace to deliver the largest single revenue month in this brand’s history. A ten percent creative hit rate, I gotta be better. But also…a 10% hit rate, scaleable beyond even our lofty expectations pretty much overnight.
This is the story of content marketing in 2023. For small teams (and even many big teams), it has to change in 2024.
So…What Happened In 2023?
I’ll forever remember 2023 as the year I beat my head against the brick wall of content demand. The year I finally gave up on the power of Photoshop in favor of the efficiencies of Canva (something 2 years ago I swore I’d never do). The year I probably 5x’d the day-to-day time I’ve spent within design and video editing software.
Why has it happened? Email marketers need more campaign volume, more segmentation, more personalization. Media buyers are getting ridiculous signals from new ad platform algorithms to test more creative variations, find winners, and scale. Winners crush, but most ultimately burn out quickly or fail all together. SEOs are now competing with AI-assisted bloggers. Across nearly every channel based on every core KPI I’ve seen, content demand just keeps going up and to the right.
I’ve put more hours this year into process, content strategy, and production than any other single task this year, and I don’t even consider myself a content guy.
We’re All Struggling With Creative Demand
Creative has always been a challenge, but this year has felt like a different beast. Everyone, and I mean everyone, is struggling with performance marketing content right now. It might be a haphazard process to keep up the pace of creation. It might be a lack of creative direction as platforms and consumers rapidly evolve. It might be the costs of creation at higher volumes. It might be gaps in reporting that hinder good creative decisionmaking. Headwinds abound for creative teams.
All of these problems come from this one issue: digital platforms demand far more content than most creative teams can support. And that demand growth will continue to outstrip supply for the foreseeable future.
Addressing this imbalance will be the core challenge of digital marketing over the next several years. Unfortunately, the options to fix it are somewhat limited.
The content demand of core marketing platforms needs to come down. Hard to imagine in our attention economy.
Content supply needs to go way up. Ask your content teams how they feel about that prospect.
So if most teams are going to have to explore option #2, then we’re talking more budget, more headcount, more influencers, etc, right?
I know I need more content, but what is a financially realistic path to get there? How do I allocate to content to generate maximum bottom-line value and sustainable growth?
Ask the C-Suite how they feel about that prospect? Without access to cheap capital and the current omnipresent threat of recession, the slow march to profitability is becoming a sprint for many DTC brands. How will brands pivot to reach the finish line? Cost cuts baby…or as I’ve recently heard them called in a clever rebrand—“margin innovation.”
In 2024, I fully expect margin innovation to come to a content team near you. So we have to look for other solutions.
How do we fix it in 2024?
Software and data will drive production costs down and output up. So will the choices of creative decision makers. We all have to develop better processes for generating winning creatives.
Software, Content Teams And Cost Savings
Right at this inflection point for creative teams—increasing content demand with proportionately fewer dollars—a slew of new efficiency-oriented content tools are emerging. Yep…I’m gonna say the buzziest of buzzwords — A.I.
A year ago, Chat GPT did not exist. Today, there are thousands of add-ons and copycats across countless verticals like text generation, image generation, design generation, code generation, data processing, and so many more.
We’re not even 12 months into the A.I. phenomena and every single platform I use for daily content creation has launched useful A.I. tooling. I make stuff faster today than I did before A.I. What does my workflow look like in another 2-3 years? I don’t expect A.I. to fully replace warm bodies in that timeframe, but imagine the cost savings if a creative team could increase output by 10-15% with the help of A.I. tools. What if it’s 20-25%?
It seems like we’re a long way from usable text-to-video models with real-life marketing applications. But traditional collateral design and video editing seem awfully close to getting a massive A.I. upgrade. We know Meta is working on an A.I.-driven ad-design application. There are several super intriguing platforms trying to speed up video post production (like this and this). Twitter gurus are developing A.I. workflows (and applications) for studio photography. Software teams around the globe are working to replace man hours with machine learning in content production, which should drive costs down…right when we need it.
Data Democratization For More Efficiency
Looking ahead, I’d argue that data fluency within content teams will be the greatest source of efficiency and “margin innovation” in content creation.
I built my business on my ability to crunch numbers, find narrative, and develop strategy from that narrative. Yet I found myself pretty adrift under the new creative demands I experienced in 2023, especially in the Meta ads ecosystem. There was a lot of spaghetti throwing going on earlier in the year trying to understand Advantage+ and other evolutions of digital platforms.
Finally, I just committed to building the tooling, adding multiple layers of depth to my creative reporting that combines performance analysis and significant creative research on an ongoing basis.
Since implementing this new tooling, I’ve experienced several “Ah-ha” moments from creators at all levels as new ideas emerge from deeper regular data reviews. The bigger lightbulb moment comes a month later when we review the trendlines of those new ideas. Once you see it in real time, there’s as much thrill in the measurable positive outcome as there is in the art of creative marketing.
I’ve realized that some of the resistance and gatekeeping around data-based marketing is the result of bandwidth limitations of the people that hold the keys and poor communication overall. But when you make the numbers make sense to every copywriter, video editor and community manager, the appetite for deep creative analysis is there.
Added depth and the full democratization of data have increased our hit rates on our creative. I also think it’s improved our ability to develop novel ideas. I know I have to improve on the 10% hit rate we experienced in my opening example. To do that, I don’t just want to talk about being data driven, I want to be about it, and let the whole team in on a very granular level to create more content efficiency. Nothing generates “margin innovation” like efficiency.
The Creative Decision Maker’s Conundrum
The next skill set that top marketers will adopt will be a financial one. This is the result of the data science of digital marketing spreading to the P&L. As brands sprint toward profitability in a more challenging economic environment, it’s not enough to know how marketing efforts affect top-line revenue. A good marketer will need to know how each of their decisions drive bottom-line value and sustainable growth to the business.
With bottom-line performance as a KPI, you lose the choice between brand marketing and performance marketing, and you have to follow the numbers. Growth can come from many different types of marketing strategies. Growth plus profit typically comes from “margin innovation” and scale applied to the highest performing marketing outputs. You trim the fat and develop efficiencies on the stuff that works.
I fully expect brands of all sizes to continue to leverage a competitive advantage through production value, high concept, and adherence to “brand”—especially if they can stretch the usability of those assets in post and make the numbers with that approach work.
However, I expect many more brands will need to find competitive advantage elsewhere. The data I see for growing DTC companies continues to show that process, creative volume, and iterative testing can regularly win over art and polish. A lean, efficient, and flexible content machine can outperform a room full of strict masters. Under certain conditions, I’m sure the opposite can also be true.
Either way, these will be the choices many creative decision makers will face over the next few years.
I know I need more content, but what is a financially realistic path to get there? How do I allocate to content to generate maximum bottom-line value and sustainable growth?
No matter the decision, you can almost guarantee that the bandwidth and budget hit of an individual piece of content or marketing output will need to come down, one way or another.
Who Wins Under This Scenario?
First, I think customers win. Right now performance signals clearly indicate that iPhones work just as well as RED cameras to create winning creative. Customers like when brands let their guard down a little and engage them as peers. Real UGC (not the fake hired gun stuff) is word-of-mouth marketing at scale, it’s what customers seem to be asking for, and it’s super affordable to produce. You still need high-quality stuff…no doubt…but how much?
Second, process-driven marketers will win. Whoever can implement and perfect a Henry-Ford-production-line-like approach to creative will have a leg up. Efficient scale developed through process will be secret to success going forward. Create, review, iterate, now do it twice as fast for less $$ per deliverable.
Third, the content strategist. From my experience working with small companies and teams, it’s clear the industry needs more people who deeply understand modern content platforms. We need more people that understand the parameters for successful content on these platforms, and can clearly articulate content ideas to creators, designers, copywriters, etc. These people will be even more successful if they can hop into design, photo, and video software to physically produce their ideas or perfect their ideas as they are delivered.
Tips For Lowering Content Costs
For all businesses, but especially small DTC businesses. In no particular order and with no lurking affiliate links.
Catalog, tag, and organize your existing content library. Make both photo and video easily searchable and easier to repurpose. Then challenge yourself to support an entire month of marketing promotion with only repurposed content. Old assets and some basic canva graphics go a long way. An easy search content library saves sooo much money. I really love Air.inc for asset management these days. Way better than drive and dropbox IMO.
Climb aboard the UGC bandwagon. Yes we’re all exhausted by the UGC ads filling up the feed. But they’re there because they still work. I’ll spare you my long-winded theories on why both of those previous statements are true and instead point you to a new platform I’ve discovered called Refunnel. I haven’t fully tested it yet but it looks super promising. Gifting-only influencers is another path here. I recently had a call with Social Cat and I might give them a try. I like their value proposition for small businesses.
AI Generative Fill. Generative fill has easily been the most useful AI tooling to go live in the core image processing platforms. Exactly 12 months ago I would curse the gods when a beautiful image didn’t quite fit my design…today I pray to our new A.I. gods to make any image fit nearly anywhere.
Mid Journey Storyboarding. Out of a need for more content, I’ve spent more time conceptualizing creative. I now understand how important visual reference is to developing the best video assets. I can’t draw for squat so I just ask Mid Journey or DallE 3 to draw the storyboard for me. I call these my shitty storyboards—usually a mix of A.I. imagery, screenshots, and blocky text—cause they aren’t pretty but they get the job done. Work smarter, not harder.
Upwork + Fiver. I genuinely don’t know why it took me so long to start using these services. There are loads of great, and affordable producers for small one-off projects here. Every small creative team should have a rolodex of these people.
Start Researching. Commit to spending more time in Meta Ad Library. Follow brands you like. Use tools like Foreplay to create a swipe file for inspiration. Just committing to this practice has helped my overall content production so much.
