Another week passes, and another of the Magnificent Seven announces an AI breakthrough that makes its predecessors look like ancient tech.

The LLMs are becoming multimodal (handling multiple media types simultaneously), and their outcomes are becoming so good that even Hollywood is getting nervous.

The level of realism in physics and lighting in these examples would take weeks, if not months, to achieve with traditional 3D and post-production workflows. Now, it’s seemingly generated in minutes, using nothing but a simple text prompt.

Whilst a ‘simple’ text prompt sounds easy, plugging these tools into our marketing workflows is not without its hurdles.

In this article, we propose a way for brands to consider the benefits of AI automation: balancing the efficiency it provides with the brand integrity it risks eroding.

The blocker for brand adoption: creative control

As impressive as these generated pieces of content are, including the possibility to do things in a fraction of the time it would take humans, they can rarely produce exactly what a user wants. The copy does not match the brand tone of voice, and the brand's logo looks distorted in some images or videos.

Although it is probably just a matter of time before these issues are solved, right now, it’s these kinds of kinks that have many marketers holding off on adopting AI tools. Even if it is used to create content, the output often needs some human intervention before it can be pushed live.

Managing global marketing content is hard

Anyone who manages a global marketing operation knows that it’s a ton of moving pieces; all kinds of copy need to be written, proof-read, edited, and translated, and all image content needs to be produced, retouched, cropped, reviewed, filed, shared, uploaded, etc.

When you have hundreds or thousands of products, it’s a big effort requiring a tightly planned and standardized process to minimize mistakes and ensure the right content goes to the right channel at the right time.

So with AI being great at doing things fast but still imperfectly, how can we create new workflows to create more value for the business?

Inspired by thinking from the product world

We took inspiration from the product world when considering how to approach AI automation in marketing operations. The term “Minimum Viable Product,” or MVP, is an approach that has dominated our industry for the past ten or so years.

The MVP framework is based on the premise that you can provide sufficient customer value by delivering minimal features that early adopters will use. Then, for each release, you add features that will onboard new customers. This approach allows you to validate the business model and value proposition with as little financial risk as possible.

Minimum Viable Content

In the era where we can use and apply generative AI tools to content creation, we define Minimum Viable Content (“MVC”) as the content that a brand is comfortable producing while sacrificing creative control and quality in exchange for unprecedented time to delivery.

For example, a S/S 2025 campaign running on billboards in the city will naturally require total creative control by all stakeholders and will, therefore, not be suitable for AI automation.

However, consider website copy for a simple product’s maintenance instructions in a non-priority-market language — if that content is 100% AI-translated, without human fact-checking, then the time saved by fully automating will outweigh the risk of a major problem or mistake.

By adapting this way of thinking about our brand assets and marketing content, we can create 80% of content in 20% of the time, freeing up time and resources to make the hard-working content much, much better.

Mapping it out on a spectrum

How we approach this with our clients is to start with an MVC workshop, where we map out all brand and marketing touch points and weigh them based on categories such as difficulty, frequency, visibility, error tolerance, creative governance, and cost.

The outcome is an overview of all marketing touchpoints on a spectrum making it easy to identify the type of content ripe for full, partial, or no AI automation and can serve as the foundation for the company’s AI strategy.

MVC is a foundational piece of a firm's AI strategy

By mapping out the Minimum Viable Content for the company, we can easily identify which areas of the operation can benefit from AI automation and help our clients allocate their budget where it will have the most impact.

If you’re not sure this kind of process is for you, ask yourself these questions – if you answer yes to even just one of them, then AI could help you:

• Do you sell across markets in multiple languages?
• Do you wish your time to market from idea to campaign launch was more efficient and cost-effective?
• Does the cost of campaigns photoshoots, set building and team time hold you back from being your most creative?
• Are you running a multi-disciplinary team that is often at capacity and would love to save some time?

Curious to learn more?

Contact Georgios to find out how we could help your marketing, communications and AI integration.