Our thinking

Creative content crisis

12 July, 2024

When picturing corporate waste, what comes to mind? Paper? Coffee cups? Stationery? What about creative content? Probably not, but The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity recently highlighted a study revealing that over half of the content commissioned by marketing teams is never actually used. 

Through auditing Fortune 500 companies, the AI-driven report by CreativeX found that 52% of creative content goes unused, equating to approximately $25 million in wasted spend per company, or over $100 billion industry-wide. 

While the use of generative AI to optimize content creation is increasing, this research suggests that more content doesn’t necessarily lead to greater impact, but rather increases waste. In fact, CreativeX report marketing teams would benefit more from better visibility into how their core assets are localized, versioned, and repurposed across markets, brands, channels, and agencies, rather than from the continued roll out of AI generated content – or creative content of any other form. 

There are obvious challenges here from a marketing ROI perspective, and we’re sure there are many nifty AI tools that will promise to help with that too. But in the meantime, this report got us thinking about what companies could do with the bank of unused creative output many of them are sitting on. Could they put it onto an open-source repository, for use by others or to act as a source of inspiration at least? Should they make sure they maintain a bank of old ideas, and have a good look through them before commissioning something new? Or how about donating unused content to charities and NGOs, maybe they could even use AI to repurpose the discarded material rather than letting it go to waste? 

By Nia Vines