George Huff says that it was a simple question from an executive at Nike in 2012 that made him understand one of the biggest problems in marketing: “What’s going on with the São Paulo Marathon?”

Huff, CEO of Opal, outlined the challenge of keeping marketing output aligned during a thought leadership spotlight at From Day One’s Atlanta marketing conference. He shared some of the many reasons executives struggle to keep their marketing efforts on track.

Huff, then a consultant in Portland, noticed that the sheer volume of corporate marketing content makes it hard for companies to track what is being published in their name or how it impacts their brands and relationships with customers. Nike, for example, had 650 social media accounts producing content daily but struggled to monitor just one tied to a road race in Brazil. Even then, tracking all accounts in detail and understanding how they aligned with the company’s broader identity and strategy was nearly impossible. Nike is not alone and the challenge is only set to grow.

Part of the challenge is the culture. Creative people who produce content are independent and self-directed and do not automatically follow instructions. They are often organized into small teams, each focused on its own projects. Nike’s 650 social media accounts may be an extreme case, but large companies often have multiple teams working on different aspects of marketing, including product lines, advertising, events, and brand identity. It is easy for these activities to fall into siloes, says Huff. 

Even if your various teams are communicating with each other, plans still tend to get muddier as they filter through a large organization. Strategic directives come from top executives and filter down through middle management, but content comes from individual workers who may not understand the assumptions and nuances behind the overall strategy—assuming they were fully briefed on it or bought into it in the first place. “Your strategy dilutes as it goes through your organization. Control disappears with it. And then what’s played back to you often doesn’t look like what you set it out to be,” said Huff.

The control problem appears to be common among marketing executives. When Huff asked his audience whether they would prefer more content or better control, almost everyone raised their hands for better control. “Well, the bad news is, you’re probably all going to get more content, whether you like it or not,” Huff said.

AI can produce a flood of text, images, and audio in minutes with a well-crafted prompt. It makes creating material for all types of media easier, and smart marketing executives will not want to suppress that output, he says. More content gives more opportunities for customers to hear about a company and its products. The challenge is ensuring every message aligns with the company’s identity and supports its overall marketing strategy.

Using traditional tools, tracking all the content is a high-friction activity, involving meetings, emails, and presentations. The right toolset can turn this into a low-friction activity, collecting and organizing content as it is created and quickly producing summaries for managers to review. And even better, it can put the strategic plan front and center while content creators work, rather than being a slideshow sitting on a server that employees may or may not review periodically.

Opal creates tools that will tame that creative torrent and foster connected planning between executives and the many content-creating teams, says Huff. These tools can make it easy for them to coordinate with each other and work within the overall strategic plans. The applications are designed to track and generate valuable reports: strategic plans, week-by-week calendars, content approvals, workflows, and general project management and process reports. “We have to build really, really good, world-class experiences that people want to use for this whole thing to work,” he said. 

Ultimately, marketing is about the customer experience, but creating compelling experiences requires marketing executives to guide their creative teams efficiently. Time spent monitoring and managing countless teams—like figuring out what is happening with the São Paulo Marathon—is time that executives cannot devote to focusing on customers.

Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Opal, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight. 

Paul Kersey is a former attorney and freelance writer who has covered events for Bloomberg News and other outlets.  Paul is based in Chicago, IL.

(Photo by andresr/iStock)