Part 1: “I’d like to make a change.”
The dreaded phrase so many in commerce hope they don’t hear. As teams work to make the vision of their bosses a reality, it seems that everyone in the company needs to get their hands on the content for approval before it can be published. Before you know it, like the telephone game, the result – in this case a published piece of content – is at best a distorted and watered-down version of its original self, if not entirely different.
The old content creation process
But why is the content creation process so dreadful? Well, it’s largely due to the fact that getting content from ideation to publish takes a lot of work and involves a lot of people. Leadership setting strategy, managers executing plans, individual contributors doing a bunch of work. So many different teams are involved: legal, supply chain, ecommerce, marketing, IT/operations, development, customer service, brand, vendors... the list goes on.
When content finally becomes tangible, and everyone is in a room reviewing it or, frantically sharing links and posting feedback in Slack or via email, changes are inevitable. This starts a vicious cycle that sends the content back up the chain, upstream for revisions, then down and around again. Repeat ad nauseam.
What if it could be different? What if those closest to the customer had the ability to create, to change, to improve and ultimately deliver with little standing in their way? What if making a change took seconds instead of days? What if instead of the normal content creation process taking weeks or months, it could be measured in days? What if life in commerce became enjoyable and rewarding on a level never experienced before?
“Sorry, this will have to be good enough” will never be spoken again!
How AI will shape the new content creation process
AI is poised to change commerce forever. As a marketer, you might use AI to brainstorm ideas, analyze past campaigns, and find new segments the human teams never identified. Creatives might generate imagery to help bring ideas to life from briefs with minimal effort, or quickly modify existing assets to fit new requirements. UX, CRO, and content producers can prototype layouts and content versions to quickly gather feedback before investing time and energy into final comprehensive layouts. The possibilities are endless.
AI will dramatically shorten the time from ideation to publish, and after go-live, will provide rich analysis and recommendations for future campaigns through continuous learning. This means existing teams and processes can actually do more with less, an unfortunate demand in today’s workforce that before AI meant constant settling and compromises on quality.
And AI will finally be the missing piece that completes the commerce puzzle: the ability for companies to deliver content that’s relevant, timely, and accessible to the customer, at scale, on all channels.
Stay tuned for part 2 where I’ll break down the content creation process from start to finish, showing the myriad ways AI will influence and augment how you work and ultimately how the customer will benefit. I’ll explore the dramatic changes in resources, time, quality, dependencies and more. I’ll even share new ways of structuring your teams to take advantage of Amplience and give your company true differentiation and competitive advantage.