Key takeaways
Retail content teams are being asked for far more content, far faster, for far less money.
Content operations costs are hard to pin down, because the spend is split across budgets.
The CORE Report puts a number on that cost and gives you a way to work out your own.
Knowing your number is the starting point for a real conversation with whoever owns your P&L.
At some point this year, you’ve probably been handed a version of the same brief. Make more content, for more channels, in more markets. Make it faster, because trends now come and go in days. And make it cost less, because the board has read about what AI can do.
Nobody writes it down quite like that, but you know the one.
Jeremy Straker, our Co-CEO and Chief Commercial Officer, opened Amplify: Agentic Commerce Live at Abbey Road Studios in September by putting that brief on the screen as three numbers. A hundred times the content, six months cut to six hours, and a sixty percent reduction in cost.
“Together they’re an impossible brief,” he told the room. “A hundred times the content, at social speed, for nearly half the cost.”
There were a lot of nodding heads. Then he asked a question that’s much harder to answer than it sounds. If you’ve been asked to take sixty percent out of your content costs, do you know what those costs are today?
Answering it honestly means pulling together figures from marketing, ecommerce, creative and finance, and that’s where it gets difficult. That difficulty is the reason we created The CORE Report.
Why don’t retailers know what their content costs?
Content spend is scattered across teams, agencies and tools, so nobody sees the whole picture. And some of the biggest costs don’t appear in any budget at all.
Try adding yours up. There are the people who write briefs, and the people who design, write, check, translate, tag and publish. There’s the agency you call when volume spikes. There are the tools, and the AI subscriptions that have quietly piled up since last year. Each of those sits in someone’s budget, but rarely the same someone’s.
Some of the cost never appears on an invoice at all. The rework when something comes back wrong, the approval rounds that stretch a two-day job into two weeks and the time your team spends chasing where things have got to all cost money, but nobody gets billed for them.
AI hasn’t made that picture any clearer. It has made individual tasks cheaper, like writing a description, translating a page or resizing an image. But a cheaper task doesn’t make the operation around it any cheaper. You end up producing more, which means more to check, approve and deliver, often through exactly the same handoffs as before. The savings on the task get swallowed by the operation.
So you’re being asked to cut a cost you can’t fully see. Before you can answer the impossible brief, you need a starting point.
What is The CORE Report?
The CORE Report is our research into what retail content operations really cost. It gives you a framework for working out your own number.
CORE stands for Content Operations, Real Economics. It follows content from the first brief to the published asset, across both product pages and campaign content. It breaks the work into nine stages, from planning, creation and editing through localization, metadata, asset management, distribution and optimization, plus the coordination that holds it all together.
For each stage, it models what the work costs at three catalog sizes, per product and per campaign asset.
It also looks beyond the content budget, at what slow or thin content costs you elsewhere. That includes returns, abandoned baskets, and ranges that launch after the full-price selling window has started to close.
Then it looks at what changes. The report works through two of retail’s most common workflows in detail, product descriptions with translation and supplier image standardization, and shows stage by stage where the savings come from. It also includes a calculator, so you can model your own numbers.
The headline figure gets attention. For a large-catalog retailer, CORE models annual content operations spend at $33M to $70M. The report suggests that once you map everything, your real total could be two to three times your first estimate.
We know how vendor research can look, and Jeremy said as much on stage. “You should be skeptical of vendor research,” he said. “I would be.” That’s why the report shows its working. The figures are built from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data and published market pricing, and every assumption is laid out, so you can test it against your own business.
It’s also why Jeremy didn’t ask anyone to take his word for what’s driving the change. He handed the stage to Chuck Gahun, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester, who has spent the past year measuring it independently.
Why does content cost matter more now than it used to?
Content used to support the sale. Now it decides whether your products get found, so the operation behind it has become a commercial risk as well as a cost.
When product discovery happened mostly on your own site, thin or late content cost you a conversion here and there. Now AI shopping agents and answer engines read your product content to decide what to recommend. Chuck’s research shows how far that shift has already gone. Forrester found that 34% of UK and 26% of US online adults used ChatGPT to search for products in 2026. It also found that when AI agents hit gaps or conflicting information, they treat it as a sign the source is unreliable and move on to a competitor.
That changes who cares about your content costs. When the operation behind your content affects both what you spend and whether your products get found, it matters to your CFO and your commercial team as much as it does to your content team.
What can you do with The CORE Report?
You can use The CORE Report to estimate what your content operations cost each year, see which stages of your workflow that money goes on, and build a business case for changing them.
Get your number.
Start with the CORE calculator. It models your content operations spend at your own scale in a few minutes, and it gives you something far more useful than a guess.
Find where it goes.
The report breaks each piece of content into the nine stages it passes through, so you can see where the cost sits. A mid-market banner and social kit is a good example. It costs $1,136 in the report’s model, but only $550 of that is the design and copy. The rest goes on briefing, localization, checks, approvals and handoffs, which AI writing and design tools barely touch. Run the same exercise on your own workflows and you’ll see where your money actually goes.
Take it to whoever owns your P&L.
Jeremy’s advice to the room was to take the report back to the person who owns the budget. It gives them a baseline, a realistic range for what could change and the evidence behind both.
How do you start reducing your content operations costs?
Start with one high-volume workflow that’s easy to measure, like product descriptions or supplier image standardization, and reduce the cost of that before you take on anything bigger. The report works through both of those workflows stage by stage, so you can compare your own costs with the model.
This is also the first stage of the CORE Maturity Framework, a five-stage model set out in the report, which starts with making one painful thing go away. Each stage after that builds on the last, until content stops being overhead and starts working like infrastructure.
Once you know what your content operations cost each year, and which stages that money goes on, the brief starts to look less impossible.
But it all starts with one question. Do you know what your content really costs?