By: Georgette Virgo

“Do more with less” is hardly a new directive in business. It has long served as a kind of operational ideal, an expectation that teams will stretch every dollar, every hour, and every asset to deliver outsized results. Few leaders, however, feel the weight of this mandate more acutely than chief marketing officers (CMOs). Tasked with producing content across multiple channels for diverse audiences while working within budgets that remain stubbornly flat, CMOs have arguably one of the most important roles in the C-suite.

Recent statistics reveal that marketing budgets continue to hover at around 7 to 8% of company revenue, even as media prices rise and content demands soar across commercial campaigns. CMOs are being asked to maintain creative integrity and brand consistency while multiplying output and proving tangible business impact.

Yet within this pressure lies a genuine opportunity to make “do more with less” more than a cliché. By applying supply-chain thinking to the 360-degree production ecosystem, treating content as an end-to-end system that can be mapped, measured, and optimized, CMOs might unlock new levels of efficiency, governance, and return on investment (ROI).

This article provides a roadmap for this shift, guiding CMOs through the rearchitecture of 360-degree creative production, enabling them to navigate change with greater confidence and control.

The 360 Production Ecosystem: A Unified View

A true 360-degree production ecosystem spans commercial production, digital and social content, retail media assets, events and experiential activations, social and influencer content, and more. Each has its own formats, timelines, and performance expectations, yet all of them are ultimately in service of the same brand story and business objectives.

The complexity is intensified by structural shifts: Many global advertisers are moving parts of their creative production in-house, with research showing that a majority of multinationals now produce at least some digital content internally, even as they continue to rely heavily on agencies for strategy, storytelling, and high-end craft.

This evolution has created a fragmented reality. Siloed workflows, overlapping tools, and unclear ownership lines can result in duplicated efforts, inconsistent creative, and avoidable waste. CMOs are expected to make sense of this patchwork and turn it into a cohesive system.

In this challenge, many brands are implementing a hybrid model that balances in-house speed and cost efficiency with agency expertise and innovation. This operating design assigns the right work to the right partners at the right time.

Independent marketing production advisory companies help brands make these decisions with precision, providing an objective view of how best to optimize the marketing production ecosystem, while driving value across the whole content supply chain.

“In a world of extremes, the real advantage for modern marketing organizations may come from balance. The goal is not choosing one model over the other, but designing an ecosystem where the right work goes to the right partners at the right time,” says Edmond Handwerker, Chief Marketing & Innovation Officer at APR, a global marketing production advisory.

Diagnosing the Content Supply Chain Problem

The content supply chain is complex. Ownership is often fragmented across brand, media, e-commerce, and regional teams, resulting in siloed decision-making and slow approvals. Legal, compliance, and marketing frequently review work in sequence rather than collaboratively, which may create bottlenecks that delay launches and force last-minute rework.

At the same time, many organizations sit on underused production tools and disconnected asset libraries. This disconnect and limited analytics can mean leaders may lack a clear, end‑to‑end view of what is produced, at what cost, and with what impact.

Research from technology and consulting firms has shown that structured, well-governed content supply chains could deliver up to a 30% improvement in marketing ROI. Other studies indicate that when workflows are standardized and cross-functional collaboration is embedded, content velocity can increase by around 20% while production costs might decline through reduced duplication and rework.

CMOs who invest in shared processes, briefings with approval frameworks, and integrated data can not only move faster, but they also create an environment where every piece of content is optimized to perform.

How AI Is Reshaping Marketing Production Economics

AI has evolved from an experimental add-on to a core infrastructure, reshaping how content is planned, produced, and managed across the 360-degree ecosystem.

Surveys of creative and marketing teams show that 80% of creative professionals expect AI to significantly impact branding and marketing, with around 40 to 45% already using it for visual asset creation and about 20% deploying it in video and audio workflows for tasks such as versioning, editing support, transcription, and tagging.

AI has the potential to accelerate asset creation, eliminate repetitive manual work, and enhance asset management, providing production teams a credible path to higher content volume without corresponding increases in labor or spend.

And while these technologies can unlock speed and efficiency, they also introduce risk. Fortune 500 companies are increasingly flagging AI as a material risk factor in their annual reports, citing concerns over regulatory compliance, intellectual property exposure, and the potential for off-brand or biased outputs that might erode brand equity over time.

To mitigate risk and maximize value, CMOs must counter AI’s potential upside with robust governance, establishing clear policies on data use and training sets, defining roles for human review, and setting guardrails around where AI may augment production versus where human craft and judgment should remain non-negotiable.

With the proper governance in place, AI becomes less a shortcut and more a disciplined accelerator embedded within the content supply chain.

Anticipating 2025 Production Spend Shifts

To truly “do more with less,” CMOs need to rethink not just what they produce, but how marketing production spend is allocated across the 360 content ecosystem. One critical shift has seen leading brands build modular content systems designed for dynamic creative.

In this model, core assets are created with reuse in mind, then systematically adapted and recombined for different audiences, channels, and contexts. Research on content supply chains reveals that brands adopting modular approaches could generate more assets, faster, without a linear increase in spend, unlocking meaningful cost savings and performance improvements while maintaining creative integrity.

Two additional shifts reinforce this move toward smarter marketing production spend. The first is organizational: transitioning from agency‑heavy setups to deliberately structured hybrid models. In practice, this often means that in-house studios handle high-volume digital and social work, while agencies focus on upstream strategy, platform ideas, and spikes in demand.

The second is technological: moving from a tangle of disconnected tools to a smaller number of governed platforms. Many marketing organizations operate bloated martech stacks, but use only a fraction of the available capabilities. Consolidating briefing, production, approvals, asset management, and distribution onto integrated, governed 360 content platforms reduces friction, strengthens compliance, and creates the data foundation needed for AI and automation to deliver real value at scale.

A Practical Framework for CMOs

Navigating marketing production changes can be challenging. CMOs should have a clear, practical framework, one that turns abstract mandates into operational discipline. They can consider the 5-S framework below.

• See: Develop a production baseline view across all channels, quantifying asset volumes, cost per asset, partner fees, and time-to-market so leaders can see where value is created or eroded.
• Streamline: Standardize briefs, templates, and approval paths; reduce overlapping tools; develop a preferred partner program, and clearly define which work sits in-house versus with external partners to eliminate duplication and friction.
• Scale With AI Safely: Pilot AI in low-risk, repeatable tasks under governance that aligns with enterprise risk, legal, and brand policies.
• Scale and Pilot in Parallel: Use controlled pilots to test new production models and technologies, limiting downside risk while building the capabilities required for the future state.
• Scorecard: Establish a production scorecard that links operational metrics to give CMOs a clear, data-backed view of ROI.

Key Takeaway: Maximizing the Edge of 360 Content Production

In a marketplace where competition is fierce, attention is fleeting, and content evolves rapidly, CMOs cannot rely on legacy production models and hope to keep pace. The brands that will win are those whose marketing leaders treat 360 content production not as a cost line to be trimmed, but as a strategic system to be reimagined.

By applying supply‑chain thinking to the 360 content ecosystem, leveraging AI to reshape production economics (without sacrificing governance), and streamlining operations to eliminate friction and waste, CMOs can start to make the mandate to “do more with less” both realistic and sustainable.