The 7 marketing problems CMOs are trying to solve across industries

In this article

1. Scaling content volume & hyper-personalized variations across channels and audiences
2. Balancing speed with brand trust, compliance, and AI guardrails
3. Maintaining brand governance across distributed human + agentic teams
4. Eliminating fragmented review & approval bottlenecks in AI-augmented workflows
5. Making marketing assets discoverable and reusable for both humans and AI agents
6. Orchestrating video-first and rich media at scale
7. Scaling governed AI use cases and agentic workflows while protecting brand and compliance

Quick takeaway

Across industries, CMOs are facing the same structural challenge.

Content demand is growing faster than the systems used to manage it.

Solving these problems requires more than faster campaign execution. It requires modern content infrastructure that connects assets, workflows, human teams, governance, and AI.

Across industries, CMOs described the same operational pressure: content demand is rising faster than marketing teams were designed to handle.

Campaign launches that once required a handful of assets now require dozens or even hundreds of variations across formats, channels, and regions. Marketing teams are expected to support a growing number of channels while refreshing creative more frequently than ever.

Industry data confirms this shift. According to a commissioned Forrester Research report of global content leaders, three out of four organizations expect the requirements for supporting rich media to increase over the next two years, driving increased investment in content infrastructure. In fact, 80% of organizations plan to increase their investment in technology used to manage rich media content.

As content demand increases, many organizations are shifting from simply producing assets to orchestrating content operations across teams, systems, and workflows.

Many CMOs described the challenge of balancing marketing speed with brand governance.

In regulated industries such as healthcare, financial services, and telecommunications, campaigns must move quickly while still maintaining strict standards for brand consistency, regulatory compliance, and accurate messaging.

The same commissioned Forrester Research study highlights the scale of this challenge. 64% of organizations report legal or regulatory compliance challenges tied to how digital assets are managed and shared, demonstrating how fragmented content systems can create real risk for marketing teams.

As marketing velocity increases, organizations need systems that allow teams to move quickly without sacrificing governance or control.

As organizations grow, more teams (and now AI Agents) begin creating marketing content across regions, agencies, and departments.

CMOs consistently described how this growth introduces new challenges for maintaining brand consistency. Marketing materials are often created outside centralized systems, increasing the likelihood of outdated assets, inconsistent messaging, or unauthorized brand variations appearing in campaigns.

Data compiled from the Forrester Research study shows how widespread this issue has become. 64% of organizations report missing opportunities because digital assets are siloed across disconnected systems, while 67% say they struggle to reuse or update existing content. Without centralized asset governance, maintaining consistent brand standards becomes increasingly difficult as teams scale.

Nearly every marketing leader we spoke with identified review and approval workflows as a growing bottleneck.

As content production increases, traditional approval cycles often become difficult to manage. Feedback is frequently spread across multiple tools, including email, messaging platforms, project management software, and file-sharing systems. This fragmentation can slow down production and make it difficult to track decisions.

The Forrester Research report also shows that inefficient digital asset practices can create ripple effects across organizations, increasing workloads for creative teams and delaying key decisions when assets are difficult to review or track. As content operations scale, structured workflows and centralized collaboration tools become increasingly important.

Even large enterprises often lack a reliable system for managing marketing assets.

CMOs frequently described environments where assets are scattered across multiple platforms such as shared drives, cloud storage services, design tools, and internal servers. This fragmentation makes it difficult for teams to locate approved content or understand which version of an asset should be used.

Industry data from Forrester Research confirms this challenge. 69% of organizations say they need better AI-powered search and discovery to rapidly access content, while 62% report being overwhelmed by the number of digital assets they manage. Without centralized content management, teams often recreate assets instead of reusing existing materials.

Many organizations are moving toward video-first marketing, but their infrastructure has not kept pace.

Marketing teams increasingly rely on video for campaigns, social channels, and customer engagement. At the same time, video content often lives in separate production systems, storage platforms, or archived media libraries that are difficult to search, reuse, or orchestrate with agents.

The Forrester Research data shows this trend is accelerating. Three out of four organizations expect the requirements for supporting rich media such as video to increase over the next two years, driving additional investment in content infrastructure. As video libraries grow, organizations need systems that can manage both media complexity and production workflows.

AI came up in every conversation with marketing leaders.

However, many CMOs are approaching AI adoption pragmatically. Rather than focusing only on experimentation, organizations are prioritizing practical use cases such as improving asset discovery, automating metadata tagging, generating asset variations, and accelerating production workflows.

Industry data from Forrester Research reflects this tension between opportunity and implementation. 58% of leaders report that creating an effective AI integration strategy is one of their biggest challenges, even as interest in AI continues to grow. At the same time, 67% expect their use of AI in content operations to increase within the next two years.

For many organizations, this means strengthening content infrastructure and governance before expanding AI adoption.

Want to see how content orchestration works in practice?

See how organizations use Orange Logic to manage assets, workflows, governance, and Agentic AI in one governed platform.