Your Content Supply Chain is Running Backwards

By Nick Parish

Inside every product redesign there comes a moment of truth. It’s usually when the initial audit reaches the Digital Asset Management (DAM) platform, and a team is finally able to quantify the breadth of content in an organization visually.

The big tell? How many variations of the logo you find. A logo is ubiquitous. But, it’s not endlessly variable. Hundreds of versions of a logo, of all different sizes, endlessly modified and tweaked and resized and recolored and stretched and squeezed and masked and filtered and slugged in a haphazard way. Dig a layer deeper and you start to notice textual variance, mutations in messaging and ad-libbed versions of product attributes enshrined in matrixes and strategy decks.

Seeing all this variance in what should be standardized makes the efficient content strategist’s heart ache. All these versions represent waste.

More specifically, they represent a failure of coordination. You’ve all been there when someone pushed inaccurate pricing or outdated information based on outdated information, rather than consulting an organizational standard.

Governance systems that create visibility and spread success, with checks enabled by automation, will not only cut waste, but also help content supply chains to run on user demand signals, not business-driven forecasting.

A more rigorous playbook is necessary to acknowledge and address the natural tendency of content to be created, distributed, and experienced in silos. Silos inevitably lead to waste, so here’s what I recommend focusing on to rein it in.

1. Coordinate and bust silos

Content—across product communications, marketing, sales, and the entire breadth of the customer experience —is produced in thousands of different ways, by hundreds of parts of any organization.

Some kinds of content make sense to create top-down, reinforcing positioning or macro shifts (e.g. employee headshots to go with a site redesign). These are planned and executed by the content experts.

Other content flavors arise in a bottom-up way, based on immediate needs. These needs are sensed by listening to customers, or observing their behavior. For example, customers might be wondering how our product integrates with another popular product, and a whitepaper or webinar is born. This needs-based content naturally defaults to siloed execution.

Pulling content out of the silo requires reframing around coordination. Currently, teams identify a need, start production, then (maybe) check if something exists. When that webinar about integrations gets approved, nobody asks: “What’s our best practice for running a good Q&A?” The content is created, published, and measured in isolation.

2. Shared visibility deters content waste. AI supercharges it

With a proliferation of enterprise tools to make content, and platforms to distribute it, content creation has become a ubiquitous capability inside an organization.

This isn’t a new problem—SiriusDecisions found in 2013 that 60-70% of B2B content goes completely unused. GE Healthcare discovered 82% of their content had never been touched. To say nothing of it being ignored by its intended recipient. But AI has made the problem exponentially worse. When content creation was slow and expensive, waste was at least contained.

Now, with AI-assisted production, teams can generate a flood of mediocre variance at scale. Each new thing becomes a potential fork, compounding the coordination problem. Hundreds of logo variations become thousands. Isolated webinars become dozens of similar-but-not-quite-the-same social assets, shared and embedded everywhere. The mind staggers at the number of potential unread whitepapers.

Could the same automations that helped ineffective content proliferate be used to rein it in? With a little human-specific elbow grease, yes.

3. High-velocity content governance must set the pace

Laura Klein at the Nielsen Norman Group wrote that design systems need “enforcers,” which “sounds authoritarian, but it’s really about stewardship”. This should be an ultimate goal for a content governance group. But efforts would first have to be systematized at all. Sure, the component parts of content (brand, design, and strategy) have systems. But then what?

Bringing systems thinking to content creation requires shared visibility across teams, which first demands a communications layer. Whether you call it a Content Council, or an Editorial board, or a Workflow and governance team, the behavior is the same: Gather operational leadership, creators or commissioners, and analysts. Set a reasonable cadence (start with quarterly) with the mandate to create visibility into what’s working, what’s planned, and where overlap might create efficiency.

Shared visibility and improving content performance are two near-term goals. They’re not the most important, though. Organizing distribution and context—the parts that give content structure and meaning— are. Teams gathered in a governance effort should focus on how content successfully meeting needs inside siloed channels can be modified to bring value to new audiences.

That webinar about integrations, with the lightning round in the chat crowdsourcing future integrations? You know, the one where 70% of attendees contributed? Upcycle that into an agenda item at a developer community meeting, or a targeted marketing effort to potential partners. That developer relations mailing list maintaining a 23% click rate has something other content operators should analyze and understand.

4. Start by surfacing what works

Setting and updating organizational content performance standards—whether through a working group, internal awards, or whatever mechanism—creates a feedback loop antithetical to waste. Overlaps can be found in planning sessions, rather than audits accompanying content transitions, like a new product development cycle or site redesign.

Here’s how I recommend you can get started now: Invite the teams in your organization making content to meet. And ask them to share back four things from last year’s efforts, explaining their choices:

• A piece of content from their team they like that performed well
• A piece of content from their team they don’t like, that didn’t perform well
• Something from another part of the org that they like, but aren’t sure if it performed
• Something from another part of the organization they don’t like, but performed well

You’ll learn from these responses. You’ll surface unknown high performers, as well as confusion about strategy and shared perception of team activity.

Most importantly, you’ll see patterns that only emerge when content operations are integrated. Use these signals to inform what gets templatized and attempted in other parts of the organization. Standout franchises and formats can travel, both in a content design sense, and in meeting an abstracted user need.

Take this effort one step further with an automation layer inventorying recent content. Try an LLM like Claude running a model context protocol (MCP) like Firecrawl to make snapshot inventories of new content, based on your team cadence. With a list of new material since the last meeting, parse how well your templates and demand-based best practices are cascading across less-siloed content cores.

5. Reinforcing coordination together with creation

After sending those extra logos to the great recycling bin in the sky, the organizational question to ask is not “Why didn’t they follow the directions,” but rather “What visibility gap left these content creators unsupported?”

Your content supply chain isn’t running backwards because creators are careless. It’s running backwards because creation now happens much faster than coordination. Content supply chain governance requires feedback loops to make efforts visible across an organization.

These assets are probably being served by your DAM right now. The big question is how you are going to help the ones created tomorrow be as effective as possible.

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