The

Content
Bottleneck

A guide to understanding and solving

content marketing’s biggest constraint
 “In 2020, content
will become marketing’s
biggest bottleneck.”

–Gartner, “Content Marketing and Management Primer for 2018”

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 What does it mean?
“Personalization will become standard for
brand engagements, but lack of scalable
content creation processes will become
the limiting factor for success.”
3 Gartner, “Predicts 2018: Brand Relevance Under Fire, Automation on the Rise”
At first glance, the prospect of content becoming your team’s
biggest bottleneck may be more abstract than helpful. You
may not be thinking about your team’s work in terms of discrete
steps or their challenges in terms bottlenecks. But think about
the amount of content – be it emails, billboards, or white papers
– that your team would ideally produce and compare it to the
budget and resources that you actually have at your disposal.
You are likely picturing something akin to the graph on the left.
Budgets tend to be stagnant, while the demand for content
continues to rise due to the growth of markets your brand
operates in, the channels at your disposal, and – as Gartner
points out – the use of personalization to tailor messages
to ever-more targeted segments.
The gap that exists between the two lines is a visualization
of the Content Bottleneck. It’s a gap between the resources
you have and the content you need.
4

Quantity
“We need more content.”
Quality
“We need better content.” How did it happen?
Coordination
“We need to take better
advantage of the content
we already have.”
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The content bottleneck can take three forms
When marketers talk about their content bottleneck it’s almost
always articulated as either quantity, quality, or coordination problem.
No matter which bucket your organization finds itself in, the outcome
is the same: Failure to deliver on your business imperatives.
As you read through the rest of this document, keep in mind
which bucket your organization finds itself in (and yes, you might be
in all three). The goal of this guide – and Percolate as a company –
is to help marketers understand, assess, and improve their ways
of working to better deal with marketing’s biggest bottleneck.
The content bottleneck didn’t emerge from a vacuum – it’s the
result of an ongoing evolution of technology, culture, and
advertising that has shaped the way brands communicate and
engage with their audiences. To better understand how content
became marketing’s biggest bottleneck, let’s focus in on three
pivotal moments in history that illustrate the shift:
• TV in the mid-1960s
• Digital in mid-2000s
• Content in 2020
 TV in the mid-1960s Even in 1995, channels were the bottleneck, or limiting factor,
for the amount of marketing content you needed.

Let’s start by rewinding back to 1965. At the time, the number

one show on television in America was Bonanza. It owned the 9pm
Sunday slot on NBC and commanded a 36.3 rating (meaning 36.3%
of television-owning households were tuned in).

If you weren’t watching Bonanza, the odds are good you were
Television Newspapers Magazines
watching either Perry Mason (CBS, 20.7 rating) or the ABC Sunday
100 channels 1,500 dailies ~100 national
Night Movie (ABC, ~15-20 rating range depending on the film).
Since almost every household in America owned a television
in 1965, when you add up those three ratings, you realized that
75% of American households were cozying up in front of the
3 television networks every Sunday evening.

Any idea how many minutes of commercials those shows had?

6 minutes each.
How do we know that? Well in 1951 the Television Board of the
National Association of Broadcasters adopted their “Seal of Good
Practice,” which determined that broadcasters could show 6
minutes of advertising per hour during prime time.
Over the next 30 years, the number of television networks had
jumped to around 100, thanks to cable. On top of that, you had
roughly 1,500 newspapers in the US and 100 magazines with
a circulation of 1 million or more. Net net: If you were a marketer
in 1995, there weren’t all that many places to put your message.
Marketing channels were still a bottleneck.

Of course 1995 is an important year for other reasons as well.

It marks the year Netscape went public and the start of the web
Do the math:
as most of us know it today.
Prime time was 7:30–11pm (3.5 hours)
across 3 networks (10.5 hours) with
What followed was the rocket ship of the 90s web followed
6 minutes of commercials per hour
by the dot com bust. As fast as the web grew in those years,
allowed. That’s 63 minutes of commercial
it wasn’t until 2007 that things really started to heat up, as the
airtime a night in America. This meant
internet moved from a thing you accessed at your desk to a thing
that no matter how many TV ads your
most of us were never more than an arms-length away from.
brand produced, there were only 63
minutes per night of distribution time.

That’s a bottleneck.

7 Source: National Association of Broadcasters 8

 2007: The year that changed marketing forever

If there’s a moment in time that should count as the birth of
marketing technology, it’s probably 2007. That is the year that
the internet changed forever, kick-starting a consumer behavior
shift that has transformed the world and marketing.
What came in the decade that followed was a complete shift
in the fundamentals of marketing. As we moved from a world
where we were constrained by the number of channels we had
to reach consumers to one where we had a 1:1 mapping of people
to touchpoints, our constraint shifted to how to best deliver
and personalize messages.

9 10
 2008: The number of connected devices surpasses
the number of people on Earth

50
50 Connected Devices

40
Quantity in Billions

30

25

More connected devices

20 than people

12.5

10 World Population
7.6
7.2
6.3 6.8

0.5

2003 2010 2015 2020

11 Source: Cisco IBSG, April 2011 12

 Growth of the marketing technology landscape over 7 years B2B Marketing Automation Systems Market

$3,300

Revenue in US$ millions

2011 ~150
$2,500

$1,800

$1,200

$750
2012 ~350 $500
$225 $325
$100

2009 – 2017

2014 ~1,000

With all that change, the bottleneck shifted from the availability
of channels to the tools needed to distribute marketing messages
into all those new locations.
2015 ~2,000
And, boy, did the market respond. Just look at the growth in the
martech landscape in the last 6 years. The vast majority of those
tools were designed to help marketers take advantage of the
new opportunities that grew out of 2007.

2016 ~3,500 All those companies weren’t just chasing dreams, either. When
you look at the revenue growth in just one category – marketing
automation – you can clearly see that there was real demand
for technology to help solve the personalization imperative.

The only problem is that as marketers we did such a good job

2017 ~5,000 implementing personalization and distribution technology that
a whole new bottleneck emerged: Content.

13 Source: Chief Marketing Technologist Source: Raab Associates 2015 VEST; 2016 and 2017 represents SharpSpring estimates 14
 “Rank these 7 areas in order of priority for your org in 2018” First choice Second choice Third choice

Content & Experience Management

20 14 11 45%

Analytics

8 11 13 32%

Audience & Data Management

7 12 12 31%

Omnichannel Marketing

10 9 8 27%

Personalization

7 9 9 25%
Content in 2020
Email Marketing

9 8 7 24% Put all those shifts together and you get an incredible amount of
strain on the upstream marketing process (described as “content and
experience management” in this study). That strain (the bottleneck
Advertising Gartner describes) is pushing marketers to approach the problem
of content as a fundamental business imperative. Simply put: if you
8 6 7 21% can’t solve your content bottleneck, you can never take advantage
of the new world of marketing in which all brands now exist.

15 Source: Adobe / Econsultancy 16

Bottlenecks constrain the throughput of the whole system
 What should marketers do?

As a marketer, you don’t have to go it alone, there’s a whole body Solving Marketing’s Biggest Bottleneck
of research that emerged in manufacturing in the 1980s on how to
best deal with bottlenecks.

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One of the most famous books is The Goal by Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt.
A “business novel” about a factory in a small town dealing with bottle-
necks, the book introduces a host of important ideas about managing Identify
production processes, most famously the “five focusing steps” that
make up the Theory of Constraints.

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Bottlenecks, or constraints, as the book refers to them, limit the
throughput of a system. It’s imperative that we focus our attention
on dealing with them, lest we are left with our bottleneck constraining
the performance of our downstream processes and systems.
Optimize
There are five focusing steps

3 Support
1. Identify the system’s constraint(s).
This is where we identify the specifics of our own bottleneck.
In content we should think about quantity, quality, & coordination.

2. Decide how to exploit the systems constraint(s).

4
This is all about the ways to optimize the process at the center

Elevate
of your biggest bottleneck.

3. Subordinate everything else to the above decision(s).

Since a constraint limits everything that happens after it,
it’s critical that we get other parts of the organization to reorient

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themselves and support the constraint, not vice-versa.

4. Elevate the system’s constraint(s). Iterate

If you’ve successfully delivered on one, two, and three, then
you should have been able to elevate your capacity in the bottle-
necked process and use that to drive incremental growth.

5. Go back to step 1. Do not allow inertia to cause a system’s constraint.

Theory of Constraints is part of a broader methodology of
constant refinement. It’s important to remember that while we talk
about content as one big bottleneck, it’s actually many little ones.
When you fix one thing you need to go back and iterate.

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 1 Identify

The first step in the process is identify.

This is an opportunity to get to know the specifics of our bottleneck.

As already mentioned, step one is to try to categorize your content
constraint into one of three buckets: quantity, quality, or coordination.
Understanding which kind of content bottleneck your marketing
organization is experiencing is crucial for how you solve the
challenge. Again, it’s totally normal to feel the pain of all three.

See the whole picture

Once you’ve identified the bottleneck, you’ve got to also think

The content bottleneck can take three forms
about how you are going to instrument your systems to give you
visibility and data about the impact of your constraint. One of
the challenges of the marketing technology explosion is that it
has reinforced the very silos marketers were trying to break down.
In order to both deliver cohesive customer experiences and solve
Quantity Quality Coordination the content bottleneck, marketers must enable themselves and
their organization to see and measure across all their marketing
“We need more “We need better “We need to take touchpoints. As we like to say at Percolate, creating great
content.” content.” better advantage customer experiences requires great marketer experiences.
of the content
you already have.”

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 2
The Variance Spectrum

Optimize

Now that we’ve identified the bottleneck, it’s time to find ways to
optimize the processes that are most constraining. As with many
problems, one of the toughest parts is figuring out where to start.
At Percolate, we use a tool called the variance spectrum to identify
and understand how to best optimize steps in a marketing process.

The basic idea is that you can lay out anything along a spectrum
from low to high variance. Low variance activities generate a Zooming in on the Marketing Variance Spectrum
similar output every time and high variance activities generate
different outputs. If you think about the parts of an enterprise,
manufacturing is a low variance discipline (you want every product
to be exactly the same—0 variance) while R&D is high variance
(you want to invent things that have never existed before). Market-
ing, as a discipline, is high variance: you try to come up with new
ways of delivering messages that will be ever-more relevant for
your target customer.

Where the variance spectrum gets powerful is when you zoom

in on a discipline, like marketing, and see that while on average
it’s high variance, there are lots of process steps where you want
no creativity. Legal approvals in a regulated industry is the perfect
example: you want it to work exactly the same way every time.

When you lay out the steps, a picture starts to emerge of what
makes sense to optimize with automation and what makes sense
to optimize with collaboration.

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 A generic cross-channel planning & alignment process

Production
Creative

Creative Campaign & Content Status

development

Every campaign and piece

of content in the system has
a status, allowing you to easily
see what’s is and isn’t on track.
Integrated
Marketing

Strategic
briefing
process
Marketing
Channel

Creative Creative
briefing concept review
process & revision Workflow & Approvals

A suite of project management

and production tools ensures
that all marketing work is on
Leadership
Marketing

Strategic Creative brief and on time.

brief concept
approvals approval
Management
Campaign

Execution Creative
plan flighted &
developed optimized
Process Analytics

Process analysis can identify

bottlenecks in the content
Finance

supply chain and help to

Legal &

Approval of Creative Approval

program invest- compliance of purchase
ment plan approval orders optimize marketing operations.

High variance Low variance

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 Resources

Upstream Process Downstream Process

3
90% Marketing Impact 90% Marketing Investment

Content Records Customer Records

Strategize Plan Develop Approve Distribute Deliver Analyze

Support

After optimizing the narrow processes touching the bottleneck, Reallocate your resources
it’s time to turn your eye to those processes that exist around your
constraint. One of the core rules of the Theory of Constraints is
How you allocate your systems and people is a critical
that any time spent not focusing on the constraint is time wasted.
component of solving the content bottleneck. In speaking
So how do you make sure the rest of the organization is working
to many marketing leaders, it’s common to hear that there’s
to help support the bottleneck instead of further inflaming it?
an uneven distribution of people across the marketing process
(not a problem in and of itself) and that many of those people
There are three key areas you should look to further alleviate your
now exist to help tune the downstream distribution systems.
content bottleneck:
If your biggest constraint is content than thinking about how
you reallocate those people and add workflow systems like
• Resources
a Content Marketing Platform to your stack is a key step
• Process
to dealing with the bottleneck.
• Communications

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 Process
Quality control before the bottleneck
One of the really simple rules from manufacturing is to put
quality control in front of the bottleneck. The reason for this
is simple: You don’t want your scarcest resource (the bottleneck)
spending any time on things that won’t ultimately see the light
of day. That’s easy to say in manufacturing, but how do you do
it in marketing? By locking down briefs and strategy beforehand
and being really clear with the team about what success looks
like for any campaigns or content.
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Communications
Make all your systems content fluent
Every marketer is trying to deliver on the promise of right person,
right message, right time. To do that, it’s critical we ensure that
systems that hold customer data and deliver content speak
the same language as our content. This is about building a
shared taxonomy for your marketing organization and content
and making sure that not only is all your content tagged
accordingly, but you’re also able to categorize your other
data using the same vocabulary.
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 4
Pre Optimization

Bottleneck

Elevate

Demand Capability

That brings us to step 4. If we’ve successfully optimized our

constrained process and better allocated our other systems
to support the bottleneck, then we should a) be able to better
deliver on the organization’s content needs and b) have
additional capacity that we can use to drive incremental growth.
While this looks like it’s all about volume, it’s not. Whichever Post Optimization
content bottleneck you have, it’s represented by a gap between
the demand of the organization and the capability to deliver
on that demand. Step 1 is to deliver on the need now and step
2 is to be able to build up excess capabilities that you can
Opportunity
apply to revenue-driving activities.

Examples of incremental growth activities you could “spend”

your excess capability on:
• Add additional target to your customer segmentation
• Experiment with new marketing channels or delivery
methods (like account based marketing)

We’re never going to eliminate the bottleneck completely,

but by working through the steps we should be able to drive
up our content throughput and deliver on the kinds of customer
experiences every one of us sets out to achieve. Demand Capability

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 5 Iterate
The thing about bottlenecks is that you can’t ever totally
eliminate them. Marketers implemented personalization
technology because the world of consumer technology had
changed. They did such a good job rebuilding their tech stacks
that they created a whole new problem for themselves.
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If you’re successful at working through our content bottleneck,
the outcome could very well be a whole new bottleneck some-
where else in the process. For instance, many brands are focused
on adding more customer segments to their marketing strategy
but are currently constrained by their ability to produce quality
content for the segments they already have. If you successfully
deal with the content bottleneck you may decide to go back and
add more customer segments, which, in turn, will create a new
content bottleneck. This isn’t a problem, it’s all part of the constant
loop of refinement that every production process experiences.
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 2020
is coming
fast.

Get
onboard
Percolate is The Content Marketing Platform for the Enterprise.
Our technology helps the world’s largest and fastest-growing brands at every or fall
behind.
step of the marketing process.

Let us help you unlock your content bottleneck. Contact learn@percolate.com

for more information or learn more at percolate.com/bottleneck.

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