At ProcureCon Marketing Europe, I had the chance to co-host two roundtables with Jacqueline Yu, DAM Application Owner at Canon EMEA. We explored the question: How can marketing procurement reduce duplicated content spend and drive greater value from existing assets?
The discussion was framed around four “faces” of content waste—patterns I've watched play out across 20+ years in the digital asset management industry, and recognizable inside almost any large brand.
What follows is a recap of those discussions and a practical guide to stopping marketing content waste in your organization—whether you sit in marketing, procurement, content operations, or DAM.
What Is Marketing Content Waste?
Marketing content waste happens when investment in content doesn't deliver the return it should. Marketing procurement leaders from major brands acknowledged waste rates ranging roughly from 35% to 50% of the content their organizations commission each year. The numbers weren't contested. The recognition was: this is industry-wide.
And waste isn't only about what never gets activated—that's just one piece of it.
Four Common Forms of Marketing Content Waste
Content waste shows up in four common forms:
Duplication Spend
production work for content that already exists somewhere in the organization.
Dark Assets
high-quality content that's produced and approved, then effectively disappears.
Rights Expiry
content that continues to circulate after its usage rights have lapsed, creating risk.
Localization Loops
regional teams recreating centrally produced content.
Each section below covers what that waste looks like in practice and why it persists.
Duplication Spend:
Paying Twice for the Same Content
Duplication spend is paid agency or internal production work for content that already exists somewhere in the organization, unseen at the moment the brief for new content was written.
The question I put to the room was simple:
"When your teams brief new content, how confident are you that it doesn't already exist?"
The answer across the table, was: not very.
Three Reasons This Keeps Happening
- 01
Findability is broken. Even when teams want to look, search rarely returns the right result. Multiple systems hold content with inconsistent tagging, ungoverned taxonomies, and mixed file formats.
- 02
Reuse isn't incentivized. For many teams, briefing fresh work feels more interesting than searching, adapting, and justifying reuse of something old.
- 03
There's no mandate to check. Where DAM upload is mandated, it tends to be mandated at the agency end—finished work goes in. Use of what's already in there is rarely required at the briefing end.
Why the Obvious Fix Doesn't Work
Mandating use of the DAM has been the obvious answer in our industry for two decades. Every DAM adoption playbook starts there. But, nobody has fully cracked it.
An uncomfortable truth surfaced: several leaders reported strong DAM compliance—agencies uploading everything, taxonomies maintained.
The duplication still happens, because the problem isn't about getting content into the system. It's about getting people to look there before they spend.
Dark Assets:
Approved Content That Disappears
Dark assets are content pieces that have been produced and approved but are effectively invisible to the teams they were created for, and to anyone who could reuse them, because they weren't properly ingested, tagged, or made findable.
I asked the table:
"What proportion of your approved assets are genuinely discoverable by the people who need them?"
Nobody felt confident saying most.
Without consistent metadata, an asset in the DAM (or any other content repository) is in your library the same way a book is in a library with no catalog—there, but unfindable. AI-powered metadata enrichment is starting to change this; visual recognition and automated descriptions can help surface assets that never received proper tags at upload. But there's a deeper reason that dark assets exist.
Fragmented Content Ecosystems
The systems organizations use to manage content aren't connected. The DAM doesn't communicate with other shared drives or repositories, or with the content management system (CMS). The CMS doesn't talk to the PIM. The PIM doesn't talk to the channel platforms where the content runs.
The result is that the same asset sits in multiple places in different formats, with no relationship between them. And the version that ends up downstream isn't always the version anyone in the DAM thinks they're managing.
The Missing Performance Signal
Importantly, my co-host Jacqueline pointed out that before AI took over the DAM conversation, content performance was the hot topic in the industry. It's been quietly neglected ever since.
The cost of that neglect is significant: if you don't know how well an asset performed— which channels it ran in, which markets, what results it drove, you have no basis for deciding whether to reuse it or commission something new.
Dark assets stay dark partly because nothing is telling anyone they're worth surfacing.
Every dark asset is paid-for content delivering zero ongoing return. The cost compounds across years of production, silently, because no one is measuring it. Surfacing what's hidden and measuring what works is where the fix lives.
Rights Expiry:
Expired Assets Still Live in Market
Rights expiry waste is content that continues to circulate after its talent, music, image, or licensing rights have lapsed—creating financial, legal, and reputational risk that often only becomes visible when something goes wrong publicly.
I asked:
"What is the cost when an expired asset ends up in market, financially, legally, or reputationally?"
It's a question most marketing organizations would rather not have to answer.
The stakes aren't theoretical. My co-host Jacqueline raised a recent rights-clearance failure that made headlines: a global consumer-electronics brand whose agency incorrectly cleared a recording artist's image for product packaging. A single misjudged call escalated quickly into financial and reputational damage. Most brand teams have a version of that story.
How AI Is Reshaping Rights Risk
What's making this harder is generative AI. Using AI to manipulate existing content— animating a still, extending a clip, generating a variation for a new market—creates new rights questions the original license almost certainly didn't cover.
Rights holders are getting more sophisticated about what they'll permit on AI-derived versions of their work, and standards like C2PA are emerging to embed provenance directly into the file.
But the underlying problem is the same one driving other forms of content waste—the systems that hold critical information about your content aren't connected to where decisions get made.
From Legal to Operating Concern
Another complicating factor: while rights management used to sit largely with legal, today it's an operating concern across content, marketing, and procurement.
The visibility gap is also at the heart of this. Talent rights get pulled, music licenses lapse, licensed imagery expires—and nobody knows, because the systems that track rights aren't connected to the channels where content is distributed.
That's a gap that no single team owns, which is precisely why it's becoming everyone's problem.
Localization Loops:
Regional Re-Creation of Content
Localization loops is the pattern of regional teams recreating content that has already been produced, usually because the central version can't be found, accessed, or meaningfully adapted to local needs.
I asked:
"How often do regional teams ask for content that central has already produced—just not in a way they can use?"
This topic drew the most engagement, because this is familiar to anyone who has worked in or with a global brand. And it leads to waste twice in the same campaign cycle.
Often, central produces too much. A team builds a master campaign in full—every cut, every aspect ratio, the full hero video. Then media budget gets cut, and only a fraction of what was produced ever airs. One example raised captured the absurdity: roughly £200,000 in production cost burned to save £10,000 in media spend.
Then, regional teams re-produce. They look at the master, decide it doesn't fit their audience, product maturity, or moment, and commission their own content.
Both versions are trying to deliver the same brand message. Neither is linked to the other in any system.
Where the Budget Sits
A sharp insight from the discussion: wherever the content budget sits, that's where the behavior follows. If a country owns its own content budget, that country will spend it. No amount of governance, no mandate, no technology will fully override that incentive. Where budget is centralized, compliance with central content tends to be high. Where it isn't, it tends not to be.
The Centralization Pendulum
But this is about more than where budget lives. It’s a broader pattern I've watched for more than two decades: organizations swing between centralized and decentralized content operating models on roughly a five-to-ten-year cycle.
Each extreme creates the conditions for the next swing. Centralization is too rigid for local markets. Decentralization creates content chaos. Neither works in steady state, which means there will always be multiple distributed repositories.
The realistic goal is no longer one perfect centralized DAM. It's visibility across all content systems.
The Common Root:
You Can't See What You Already Own
All four faces of content waste—duplication, dark assets, rights expiry, and localization loops—trace back to the same issue. Teams can't see all the content your organization already owns.
It isn't lost. It's somewhere: a DAM, a Box folder, an agency's drive, a regional cloud account, an old tool nobody decommissioned. The content exists. The visibility doesn't.
That's why "one single source of truth" has stayed an aspiration for two decades. That saying assumes you can get everything into one system—and the centralization pendulum guarantees you never will.
So the useful question changes. Not "how do we get everything into one system?" but "how do we see across all the systems we already have?"
That shift, from consolidation to visibility, is how the game has changed. The emerging name for the capability that delivers it is content intelligence: using AI to read content across every repository, unify what it finds, and connect it to how that content actually performs.
But, the work can start before any technology enters the picture.
How to Reduce Marketing Content Waste
- 1. Make "check what exists" a step in the brief.
Add it to your brief template as a required line, with an approval gate before production: what did we look for, what did we find, why are we commissioning new anyway? This catches duplication at the only point where catching it is cheap—before the money is spent.
- 2. Chase visibility, not a single source of truth.
Multiple repositories aren't a failure to fix. It’s how organizations end up working. So the time and budget you'd spend forcing everything into one system is better spent making the systems you already have visible to the people who need them. Audit which repositories your teams actually use, work out who's locked out of what, and open up access. Plan for fragmentation, not its end.
- 3. Tie content performance back to the asset.
Tag assets with channel, campaign, and market as they go out. Pull that engagement data into quarterly reviews and use it to decide what to reuse, refresh, or retire—and to ground future investment decisions. Performance is the strongest case any content owner has when defending budget, and most teams are arguing without it.
- 4. Surface rights alongside the asset.
Often rights information lives in a separate system, disconnected from where the content lives and gets published from. Build a cross-check into your campaign workflow: pull the rights, match it against assets going live, and flag what's about to expire. Bring rights into the brief, not the clearance pass at the end.
See the Visibility Layer in Action
Notice what those four fixes have in common.
Each one has historically had to be a standing, manual job—leading to a breakdown in processes at the scale real brands operate. That’s why we’re still having this conversation.
And it’s why we built Tenovos Glass.
Tenovos Glass sits across the DAMs, drives, and repositories you already have. It allows you to search across them, without migration, and turns the manual work to gain content visibility and action the above into something that happens automatically.
Search across every system in seconds. Tie the master asset to performance data, in different channels and markets. Surface rights and expiry alongside the asset. And the next brief can start from what already exists, and what you know worked.
After 20+ years in the content world, what's different about this moment isn't the problems. They aren't new. It's the cost. AI is making production cheaper, rights more complex, and the gap between content created and content used wider every quarter.
The question isn't whether content waste is showing up in your organization—it likely is. It's which form is costing the most, and how quickly you decide to act on it. The brands that move on content visibility now will compound the advantage.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is marketing content waste?
Marketing content waste is any spend on content production that doesn't return a matching (or greater) value. It's content that costs money to create but fails to deliver the use, reach, or business outcome it was meant to.
What is a dark asset in marketing?
A dark asset is marketing content that has been produced but effectively became invisible and unfindable in content systems. This usually happens because tagging is inconsistent, metadata was never applied, or it ended up in a repository that no one searches. If content can’t be found, it can’t be used (or reused) and delivers no ongoing value.
Why do marketing teams recreate content that already exists?
Three factors reinforce one another: findability is broken across multiple content repositories, content reuse isn't incentivized, and there is often no step in the briefing workflow for teams to check for what exists before commissioning new work.
How can teams reduce duplicated content spend?
Build a "check what exists" step into the briefing process, get visibility across all systems teams use to store and manage content, and tie performance metrics back to each asset, so content reuse and future investment decisions are based in evidence, not instinct.
A content intelligence layer makes this possible at scale—unifying content across DAM, drives, and storage to make everything discoverable, and connecting each asset to performance data.
How does content intelligence reduce marketing content waste?
Content intelligence refers to the systems, tools, and processes that turn content data—like asset usage, channel performance, and engagement—into actionable insights. For marketing content waste specifically, it gives brands visibility across all the content they already own, connects it to performance data, and helps decide what's worth reusing, refreshing, or retiring. The result: less duplicated spend, hidden assets surfaced, and more ROI from content already paid for.
