Securing Future Viability: How Agencies Can Master the Pressure on Content Processes in Challenging Times

At present, a rather unusual calm prevails in many European agencies. What was once a constant buzz of meetings, campaign launches, and client appointments now sounds more like restraint. Budgets are no longer being approved, pitches are postponed, projects frozen. Increasingly, news appears that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago: agencies closing down, being taken over by competitors – or simply no longer receiving assignments.

The reasons are manifold, but the pattern is clear. Europe is in an economically tense situation: worries over growth, sluggish consumer spending, rising costs, geopolitical uncertainty. Companies respond with austerity programmes – and marketing traditionally is one of the first areas where cuts are made. A recent survey shows: 60 per cent of European marketers plan further reductions in their advertising spend in 2025 (see Meedia.de, issue 22 May 2025). For agencies, whose business models are often directly tied to these budgets, the situation is becoming increasingly critical.

While large international networks have already issued profit warnings, the pressure hits small and medium-sized agencies particularly hard.

Competition has intensified. Clients scrutinise every expense, in-house teams are taking over tasks that were previously outsourced, and new technologies – especially AI-driven content production – are changing expectations regarding speed, quality, and price. At the centre of this transformation is a sector that long served as a growth engine: content operations. It is here that perhaps the greatest pressure for increased efficiency, standardisation, and automation is now emerging.

Efficient Content Operations as the Key to Competitiveness

As agencies need to realign themselves in this uncertain environment, one question is coming to the fore more than ever: How can content processes be organised more efficiently, predictably, and cost-effectively? Because although the demand for content remains unabated – from social media to performance marketing and SEO – its production is increasingly under scrutiny. Clients expect results faster, cheaper, and with clear measurable added value. At the same time, internal workloads in agencies are rising: more channels, more formats, more tools, more revisions, more coordination.

Thus, the pressure is shifting from pure budget cuts to a structural challenge. Many agencies find that the problem is not primarily in the creative work – but in the content operations behind it: planning, coordination, production, formatting, versioning, distribution, reporting. This is exactly where the majority of costs and friction occur, especially in times of scarce resources.

What follows explains why this operational foundation has become the decisive factor for competitiveness and how agencies can stabilise their margins and grow despite a difficult market environment through new processes, technologies, and tooling.

Another aspect often overlooked in the current debate lies in the developments of the past decade and a half. After the 2008 financial crisis, many central banks massively lowered interest rates and kept them at historically low levels for years. Cheap money fueled global economic growth like hardly before. Marketing and digital agencies also benefited disproportionately during this time. New business models emerged, the demand for digital campaigns and content rose rapidly, and many agencies grew faster than they could professionalise their internal structures.

In growth phases of this nature, the same phenomenon often occurs: as long as orders keep coming in, attention to internal cost structures wanes. Inefficient workflows, personnel excesses, or an overloaded toolset go largely unnoticed during booms or are consciously tolerated to enable faster scaling. But what can be easily concealed in good times becomes all the more apparent in tougher economic phases.

This is exactly where the industry stands today. The economic downturn ruthlessly reveals how many agencies have become organisationally bloated in recent years. Those whose core business lies in content production and distribution are particularly affected. Here, increased client demands encounter internal processes that are often fragmented, time-consuming, and error-prone. The result is an industry suddenly under enormous pressure to streamline and radically tighten its processes.

Why Content Operations Are Especially Affected

Hardly any area within agencies has grown as strongly in recent years as content production. Social media, always-on campaigns, multi-channel distribution, SEO content, video shorts, paid assets, newsletters, podcasts – every new format, every new platform brought additional requirements. For agencies, that meant: more output, more variants, more speed.

But this growth was rarely accompanied by modernising the underlying processes. Many agencies have built up their content structures organically over years. Layer upon layer, team upon team, tool upon tool. This has led to operational complexity that is becoming problematic today.

1. Fragmented Processes

In many agencies, content workflows are spread across numerous systems: idea management in one tool, briefs in another, assets in the cloud, approvals via email, distribution across multiple platforms. Every handover costs time, every media break carries a risk of errors. As long as budgets were generous, this fragmentation was tolerated – today it is a clear competitive disadvantage.

2. High Coordination Effort

Content production is team-intensive: editorial, design, video, social, paid media, client side. In good times, increased coordination needs were simply offset by more staff. Now, when every hour counts, the downsides become apparent: unclear responsibilities, redundant loops, too many feedback cycles.

3. Overburdened Teams

Alongside cost pressure, demands on speed and volume rise. Channels like TikTok or Instagram Reels require significantly more output at shorter production cycles. At the same time, teams are being thinned out. The result: stress, burnout risk, and quality loss.

4. Lack of Standardisation

Many agencies work project-oriented rather than process-oriented. That means: every client has different rules, different workflows, different special requests. In times of high margins, this could be absorbed. Now, however, the lack of standardisation is punished. Without clearly defined workflows, efficiency is hardly achievable.

5. An Overloaded Tool Ecosystem

The industry has cobbled together tools over the years: project management here, asset management there, separate tools for analytics, publishing, creative production, and approvals. The result is high costs, duplicate data maintenance, and disconnected information silos. Many agencies today have more tools than staff – but little real automation.

Why AI Alone Does Not Solve the Problem

Those who now believe that artificial intelligence can solve all these problems in the short term are mistaken. Certainly, the industry has witnessed an impressive wave of AI tools over the past two years, and large language models (LLMs) can undoubtedly accelerate or simplify certain tasks. But they only tackle the surface. The fundamental challenges – fragmented processes, lack of standards, too many coordination loops, a bloated tool ecosystem – do not disappear through a generative model.

On the contrary: without clear structures and clean processes, AI cannot unfold its effect. Many agencies underestimate how much organisational and procedural preparation is necessary before AI becomes a real efficiency factor at all. Simply adding another tool into an already chaotic system does not generate productivity but adds friction.

That is why more than an LLM is needed now. It requires a fundamental rethinking of content operations. How teams collaborate, how steps are orchestrated, which tools are truly necessary and which are not. AI can then be a powerful lever. But it does not replace structural modernisation. Without that modernisation, it will be difficult for many agencies to assert themselves in the new market conditions.

Which Cost Types in Content Operations Are Particularly Significant

When agencies talk about “efficiency problems”, this often sounds abstract. In reality, however, the biggest cost drivers can be identified astonishingly clearly. They arise from the operational details of daily content business and exactly there the silent money burners appear that remain invisible during boom phases but hit margins hard in economically weaker times.

1. Personnel Costs from Unnecessary Loops

Content teams often comprise many roles: editorial, design, motion, social, project management, paid media, client side. When every piece of content goes through multiple feedback rounds and tasks are shuffled between tools, channels, and people, wages rise exponentially. The most expensive resource in agencies is time, and most content processes burn a lot of it.

2. Costs Due to Tool Sprawl

Many agencies pay for five to eight tools just in the content process: project management, asset management, editorial calendars, publishing tools, analytics, cloud storage, approval systems. Often 30–50% are redundant. Hidden costs: training, onboarding, switching time, lack of integration, errors caused by media breaks.

3. External Production Costs

Freelancers for video, photo, animation, copy, design are essential – but ever smaller content batches often lead to overly segmented and short-notice production. This increases:

• Minimum charges
• Express surcharges
• Production uncertainties
• Revision costs

4. Overhead Costs due to Project Management

The more fragmented the work, the more internal coordination arises. Typical cost drivers include:

• Meetings that decide nothing
• Briefings rewritten multiple times
• Status rounds that only manage symptoms
• “Shadow documents” maintained in parallel
• Excel plans nobody keeps up to date

Project managers don’t work too much – the processes are just too poor.

5. “Hidden Costs” Through Lack of Reuse

Many agencies produce every piece of content from scratch. Lack of templates, absence of modular construction, and no clear reuse logic mean content is not scaled but constantly reinvented. One of the costliest mistakes in the content business.

6. Quality Costs

Faulty handovers, late deliveries, inconsistent quality across platforms, and unclear responsibilities lead to quality loss. Quality loss causes:

• Additional revision rounds
• Dissatisfied clients
• Discount negotiations
• Lost contracts

Quality is expensive – poor quality is costlier.

How Agencies Set Up Modern Content Operations – A Framework

The challenges are clear, but the solution does not lie in isolated measures but in a systematic approach. Successful agencies no longer build their content operations organically or ad hoc, but according to a clear framework. It combines organisation, processes, and technology into a seamless system that enables both speed and quality simultaneously.

At its core, the setup of modern content operations can be divided into five central steps:

1. Standardise Processes – Before Digitising Them

Many agencies go the wrong way round: they buy tools hoping this will create structure. But without previously defined workflows, this only creates technological complexity.

Modern agencies start by asking questions such as:

• How exactly does a piece of content progress from briefing to distribution?
• Where are the bottlenecks?
• Which steps repeat in every project?
• Which roles are truly necessary?

Only when a standardised core process is in place does digitisation pay off.

2. Organise Teams by Workflows, Not by Channels

Traditionally, teams are organised by platforms: social, SEO, design, video. But modern content operations think in workflows.

This means:

• Cross-functional teams for specific content types
• Clear responsibilities (content owner, editor, publisher)
• Reduced handovers and fewer silos
• Focus on output rather than boundaries of responsibility

Such structures reduce meeting load, increase responsiveness, and improve quality.

3. Think Modular Content Instead of Producing Each Piece from Scratch

The most successful agencies work with modular content systems:

• Reusable templates
• Snippets and text blocks
• Modular video assets
• Layouts used multiple times
• Uniform formatting logic that works across all platforms

The advantage: from one core piece, ten, twenty, or fifty variants can be derived in no time – without quality loss or extra cost.

4. Slim Down the Tool Ecosystem

Efficiency does not come from many tools but from a clear, lean architecture. For modern agencies, this means: instead of operating a whole patchwork of specialised solutions, the setup focuses on two central systems:

1. A project and capacity planning tool – controls what is done when and by whom:
2. A content operations platform – where the actual content processes come together, from idea to publication:

The key is their interplay: the planning tool ensures strategic and organisational control; the content operations platform covers daily operative execution. Everything beyond this – isolated solutions for partial tasks, silo systems for individual teams – should be critically questioned.

The clearer the roles of these two systems are defined, the less friction arises – and the more technology becomes a genuine efficiency lever instead of yet another complexity driver.

5. Use AI and Automation Selectively – Not Blindly Integrate

AI can be a massive lever when sensibly embedded:

• Automating routine tasks
• Versioning for different platforms
• Quick drafts for texts, captions, headlines
• First drafts of visual assets
• Automated tagging and analysis processes

Yet the principle remains: AI does not bring order – it only works within ordered structures.

Agencies that integrate AI as a “turbo” into well-honed processes see the greatest effects.

Why the Future Needs a Content Productivity OS

The transformation agencies are currently experiencing is not a passing storm but a structural turning point. The era of rapid growth, in which operational weaknesses were hidden behind full order books, is over. The industry is entering a phase where efficiency, transparency, and process quality determine competitiveness. And now it becomes clear which agencies are ready to question their structures and which cling to old patterns.

But there is also a positive perspective: the methods and technologies that make agencies more resilient and productive are already available. Standardised workflows, modular content systems, clear responsibilities, and the targeted integration of AI enable operational excellence that goes far beyond pure cost reduction.

At the core is a technological foundation that does not consist of a patchwork, but a slim, integrated setup. The future belongs to solutions that not only map the entire content chain but genuinely manage it. Here is where a new software category is emerging: the “Content Productivity OS” that rearranges the operational DNA of agencies.

Platforms such as ContentPaul exemplify this approach. As a Content Productivity OS for European agencies and marketing teams, it connects content planning, production, collaboration, and distribution within one continuous system. This turns content production from a chaotic patchwork into a clear, scalable process – no matter how many channels or formats need servicing.

Combined with a dedicated project and capacity planning tool, this setup allows agencies to work faster, more focused, and more profitably. Not despite scarce resources – but precisely because of intelligent reorganisation of those resources.

The industry stands at a crossroads. Those who now consistently invest in structures – fewer tools, clearer processes, genuine orchestration – will not only survive in a demanding market but emerge stronger.

The change is challenging. But it is also an opportunity. For agencies ready to rethink their content operations, a phase begins now in which they can become not only more efficient but truly future-proof.

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