Get ready for the future content supply chain to be autonomous, brands warned

If you’ve got a well-oiled content strategy in place – or indeed several content strategies all vying for attention and wishing to become the chosen one – then a new report from SDL may be of interest. The study, called ���Enabling the Future State of Content’, has advocated that brands need to rip up their current initiatives and look ahead to an automated future. Naturally, it’s worth noting immediately that SDL’s primary role, of content translation, has a large part of what it has to say in the report. Yet the wider trends cannot be denied. Getting the most out of what content you have is vital for any marketing department, whether it is using off-the-shelf synopses, stitching offcuts together, ‘Franken-blog’ style, or automating parts of it. The report makes note of this in what it sees as the content supply chain of the future, combining both a machine-first strategy and a human-optimised experience. In the creation process, the content creates and organises itself, but with the human touch customers can easily find what is relevant to them. The second step, translation, sees machines translating content, but users always automatically finding it in their own language. Finally, how the content is delivered means customer always get what is tailored to them; it is ‘agile, secure, and your best salesperson.’ It does sound rather a lot. Yet in a previous report from SDL, it was found 93% of organisations polled said the amount of content they produce will increase in the coming two years. Yet according to Gallup figures, only a quarter of millennial respondents said they were emotionally or psychologically attached to a brand or product. Something has got to give.