Your Tool Isn’t Broken. Your Inputs Are.

Authored by: Elise Myeroff – Senior Strategy Consultant

Marketing leadership is under intense pressure. Deliver content faster, more efficiently, more personalized, and across larger scale all while managing competing priorities, scaling creative teams, ensuring brand compliance, and optimizing content velocity. To do this, we hear a repeated conversation from marketing operations leaders:

“We already know we need to optimize our content supply chain, and we’ve selected our technology platforms. We don’t have weeks for strategy alignment, defining goals and KPIs, or assessing current state and baselines. We just need to implement quickly and see fast ROI.”

The logic is understandable. Time is scarce, budgets are allocated, and leadership expects results. Taking weeks to align on roadmap, map process, define inputs, and establish baselines feels like delay, not progress. But getting to implementation and go-live—that feels like progress.

So, organizations move straight from “we need to optimize” to “implement and go-live.” Then, without fail, the same story unfolds: Implementation launches, go-live happens, and users start working in the system. Within weeks, complaints arrive as users start running into predictable challenges: “I can’t find the asset I need,” “My project template doesn’t match our creative workflow,” “This tool is making my job harder, not easier.”

This leads to teams creating their own workarounds: spreadsheets running parallel, email approvals instead of in-system workflows, folders outside the DAM, and manual processes filling the gaps between how the system was built and how content needs to flow.

By month three or four, adoption slides and early enthusiasts become skeptical. New creative team members struggle because they’re trained on a system that doesn’t match actual creative workflows. Brand governance rules get bypassed because teams use shadow systems, and measurement is spotty at best. There’s no ability to track creative velocity, asset reuse, or resource utilization.

Then leadership asks: Did this actually deliver ROI? Are we faster? More efficient? Are we improving brand compliance? And unfortunately, there’s no answer. The baseline metrics like creative cycle time, workflow steps, content production cost, resource utilization were never established upfront, and they can’t be recreated once launched. Without knowing a before-and-after comparison, there’s no way to prove impact later.

The result of the implementation is low adoption, high manual workarounds, and significant investment with no proof of value or content supply chain improvement. The instinct is to blame the tool. Reconfigure. Add more fields. Turn on more features. Bring in another consultant to “optimize.” But the tragic part? It was all preventable. It started when strategy and inputs were never defined upfront.

The Input Problem: Technology is the Last Input to Define, Not the First

Here’s what I’ve learned working with dozens of organizations across content supply chain optimization: A system is only as effective as the inputs flowing into it.

True content supply chain transformation requires the right people, process, and governance outlined upfront, then enabled by the technology.

People: You need the right people in the right roles with clear responsibilities and training for success. These personas translate into system groups, teams, user access levels, and automated task assignments. But if the organization hasn’t defined who manages requests, who approves for compliance, who owns allocation, and who sets priorities, the system can’t enforce accountability across your content supply chain.

• Process: You need standardized, streamlined processes built from your core business drivers, accounting for planning, intake, creative development, asset management & governance, delivery, measurement & optimization. All of which translate into in-system templates, automations, and stage gates. If the process isn’t clear, your MRM system becomes a task tracker instead of a holistic marketing operations work management center, and your DAM becomes storage instead of an asset management and governance engine.
• Governance: The right governance frameworks need to outline SOPs, standards around prioritization criteria (effort, impact, strategic alignment), creative approval cycles, brand governance standards, change management protocols, training requirements, taxonomy and naming conventions, measurement and reporting needs (content velocity, brand compliance, creative utilization), resource allocation models, and necessary review and stage gates. If governance isn’t defined, teams bypass the system because they don’t understand the rules or because the rules don’t reflect how decisions actually get made.
• Technology: Only once all the above inputs are established should the technology be configured, determining what design, platforms, automations, and AI can be leveraged to drive your content supply chain goals most efficiently.

A Real Example: Aligned Upon Inputs Then Enabled by System

A scaling enterprise managing creative demand through Adobe Workfront faced a core challenge: 27% of requests were ad hoc and even planned requests were prioritized based on arbitrary due dates. Leadership asked Omnicom’s Adobe Practice to “fix this in Workfront.”

But the real fix came before we ever dug into Workfront. We started by defining governance-level prioritization criteria. We worked with the organization’s marketing leadership to establish weighted scoring inclusive of strategic alignment, business impact, effort required, and time sensitivity. Once that governance was aligned upon, then we could help them enable and enforce it within Workfront.

Governance solved the problem; the system just enforced it.

That distinction matters. Because it’s exactly where most content supply chain implementations go wrong. Organizations try to use the tool to solve problems they haven’t defined, then they blame the tool when it doesn’t work.

How to Solve the Input Problem: Slow Down to Speed Up

Taking the upfront time to lay a solid foundation is critical. Organizations that truly want to set themselves up for a strategic, differentiated operating system for the long run understand the value of slowing down to speed up. Define your strategic vision, roadmap, goals, and KPIs. Invest in current state discovery to ensure future state workflows are well-informed and anchored to your business’s unique needs. Gather baseline benchmarks throughout the discovery process so you can report back on impact.

Omnicom Adobe Practice’s content supply chain transformation methodology does just this. We start with strategic alignment, emphasizing the importance of discovery. Once the future state plan is aligned upon, technical consultants begin designing how it comes to life in the system to drive the agreed-upon goals.

Change management and governance run throughout all phases, because changing how content flows through your supply chain requires organizational alignment, not just system configuration. Every decision—from how people are structured, to how processes flow, to how technology is configured—must reinforce the new operating model and the strategic goals it supports.

A Six-Phase Approach: Content Supply Chain Transformation Methodology

Here within Omnicom’s Adobe Practice, we focus on a six-phase approach to a content supply chain transformation:

1. Strategic Alignment & Planning: Define your content supply chain strategic vision, roadmap, goals, and success metrics that will guide all work. Ensure alignment across marketing leadership and creative operations on what “better” actually means. Faster cycle time? Better brand compliance? Higher creative utilization? Lower cost per asset? This phase establishes the north star and ensures everyone is moving in the same direction.
2. Discover & Baseline Assessment: Assess current state across People (creative operations roles, resource allocation, team structure), Process (strategy & planning, intake & work management, creative development, asset management & governance, activation, measurement & optimization), and Governance (governance forums, prioritization standards, brand compliance standards, asset taxonomy, measurement needs). Document baseline metrics aligned to the goals and success criteria defined in Phase 1. This baseline is non-negotiable; it’s your proof point later.
3. Design (Future Operating Model & Technical Enablement): Translate strategic goals and current-state insights into a future-state operating model that accounts for People, Process, and Governance requirements. Define core personas, process steps, governance standards, and business requirements. Then determine how technical enablement designs—platforms, AI, automations—can most effectively deliver this aligned-upon future state. Technology comes last because it’s the enabler, not the strategy.
4. Build & Test: Configure and customize the technical enablement designs. Implement workflows, fields, access controls, stage gates, dashboards, integrations, automations, and governance rules that are intentional and measurable. Every configuration connects back to an aligned business requirement and defined input. Once built, then conduct internal testing and UAT testing to ensure the user experience is as expected.
5. Train & Enable: Prepare your organization for change. Train creative teams and stakeholders on the “why” behind the new People structure, Process, and Governance—not just system mechanics. Adoption is higher when people see the connection between their work and strategic goals like faster time-to-market, better brand compliance, or improved team capacity. Build training plans by persona so each group gets hands-on, relevant instruction.
6. Measure & Optimize: After go-live, continuously refine based on actual usage and outcomes. Measure against the baselines and success metrics established in the first two phases. Adjust processes that create friction. Identify adoption gaps and address them. Expand scope as the organization demonstrates mastery. Eventually, transition to a governance model where creative operations and marketing teams manage the system themselves.

The Bottom Line

Your tool isn’t broken. Your inputs are. And the only way to get inputs right is to do the work upfront: define strategy, validate it through discovery, and design future state before you ever touch the technology.

If you’re looking for true content supply chain transformation that sets you up for strategic advantage in the long run (not just short-term siloed fixes), you need to invest the time upfront. Organizations that do move faster, achieve higher adoption, prove measurable ROI, and build a content supply chain that actually works. Those that skip it? They’ll continue to do excellent functional work and still fall short of what the customer needs—and what leadership expected.

The choice is yours: invest upfront or pay for rework later.

About this article: This article was co-created with GenAI tools. I use GenAI as a thought partner, building on my ideas, experience, and methodologies to help refine complex operational concepts more clearly and efficiently—so I can focus on what matters most: actionable guidance for transforming marketing organizations.