In November last year, Merkle hosted a roundtable dinner with industry leaders from the Financial Services sector to discuss marketing content and the role of artificial intelligence. Last week, alongside Adobe, we held a similar event focused on the Hospitality, Leisure, Travel, and Tourism industries.

It was a unique opportunity to connect with marketing professionals from some of the UK's leading companies, taking a dive deep into the content supply chain. The conversations were incredibly insightful, and everyone walked away with new ideas and inspiration. I’d like to use this opportunity to share some of what was covered, while ensuring the privacy and business sensitivities of our attendees remain protected.

AI’s Growing Impact on Content Strategy

Despite only a few months passing since the November roundtable, the industry has evolved rapidly. When tools like Midjourney emerged two years ago, their ability to generate images and videos from textual prompts was groundbreaking. However, for brand-conscious businesses, these tools were initially more suited to concepting and ideation rather than customer facing content. Now, as AI tools mature, businesses are refining their understanding of where real value can be realized.

Going into last week’s discussion, I was particularly eager to hear from this industry sector, including distinct nuances, including:

• Unique products and services – A hotel, an event, or a journey. Each of these is often one off, rather than a repeatable commodity.
• Rapid changes in offers, pricing, and promotions – Often coupled with decentralisation of sales strategies.
• Complex brand ecosystems – One attendee’s business had over 100 sub-brands, each requiring tailored content strategies.

Below are the key themes I felt worth highlighting.

Theme 1: Too Much vs. Too Little Content

Attendees represented businesses at opposite ends of the content spectrum. One sports business had an extensive archive of video content but lacked a way to efficiently activate it. Another business struggled with content scarcity due to the high cost of production.

The sports business was solving its challenge through having AI scan archives and intelligently extract key moments from long-form videos. This approach enables scalable, easily accessible digital content, perfect for social media engagement. What I also like about this example is that it challenges the common perception that AI’s primary role in content is generation. In this case, great value is being unlocked through rapid content extraction and sorting.

Theme 2: The Changing Nature of Automation

Traditional automation relied on standardization—identifying common patterns and systemizing them. For example, templated content structures or pre-defined processing steps. AI-driven automation, however, is shifting this paradigm. While standardization brings efficiency, it can also constrain creativity. Often inflexible processes can impact team’s ways of working and create frictions.

AI offers a new approach: efficiency with flexibility. Instead of rigid templates, AI intelligently structures and organizes content, allowing businesses to scale content production without sacrificing creativity or adaptability.

Theme 3: Content Adaptation Over Creation

For now, most brand-conscious businesses are not fully embracing AI for net-new, prompt-initiated content. Instead, they are using AI to enhance and adapt existing assets. For instance, one hospitality business is modifying the food and drink on show within existing visuals. The goal being to align with the cuisine preferences of different target markets. This goes beyond common efficiency-focused objectives and opens up brand new, previously untapped opportunities. Previously, the cost and logistical complexity of producing multiple versions of the same visual would have been prohibitive.

Now, AI enables personalization at scale, allowing businesses to engage global audiences more effectively. Adobes Firefly services is one such tool enabling clients to fine tune and augment content to meet their goals. All supported by commercially safe AI models trained on licensed or public domain content.

Theme 4: Scaling Content in Federated Businesses

Hospitality, travel, and tourism businesses often have decentralized marketing teams spread across numerous locations and brands. One attendee’s company, for example, manages over 100 sub-brands, while hotel groups may oversee thousands of properties.

Content strategies need to both enable teams whilst also supporting consistency, compliance and quality. Many longstanding content supply chain principles apply here:

• Single content view with reusable assets and templates
• The right guardrails around usage and adaptation
• Tools to simplify content discovery and activation
• Common and effective workflow

Despite these principles being well established, AI's supporting role is growing. An example would be Adobe's GenStudio for Performance Marketers. This provides a common, cross channel, AI driven interface which allows for rapid content composition. Existing content assets are leveraged with quality assurance simplified through AI-trained brand guidelines. Merkle led the world's first client deployment for this technology and in a short space of time realised a 70% reduction in time to market. This demonstrates how AI can be the carrot, rather than the stick, in supporting brand consistency across complex organisations.

At the same time, we predict, the composition of marketing touchpoints will be further democratised across businesses and into the hands of the brief owners unlocking previously unachievable agility.

Theme 5: Business Maturity

There was a common anxiety of being behind the curve with respect to AI during the evening. It is easy to feel this way when, as said on the night, "AI will never be as immature as it is today." However, all attendees were masters of their craft and demonstrated leadership and maturity within their industry.

To this, I’d also add that successful content supply chain transformation is 80% people and only 20% technology. Success comes from being use case driven and not tech, or AI driven. I have been fortunate enough to have been involved in many client conversations and projects shaping use cases and building actionable roadmaps aligned with short and long term KPIs. As part of this, change management becomes a key, and often overlooked, factor to get right.

Final Thoughts.

Discussing the unique challenges across this industry was fascinating. Many of the universal challenges across the content supply chain came up. Such as manual activities, poor asset findability and reuse, and a lack of content ROI measurement.

Adobe and Merkle are solving these challenges across all industry sectors, unlocking organization’s ability to effectively deliver and scale content that personalization at scale demands.

Through Adobe’s AI-powered, integrated solution, Adobe GenStudio, together we are helping customers transform every aspect of their content supply chain – from planning to scaled production and approvals to delivery and analytics.