The Hidden Cost OF Content Chaos - And Why WE Need TO Start Wrangling IT

The average organisation is sitting on terabytes of visual content that is untagged, untraceable, unlicensed, and often unusable.

This challenge may lack the spotlight of more visible marketing initiatives, but its strategic importance cannot be overstated. It directly impacts bottom lines, brand integrity, and operational effectiveness.

The myth of 'more content'

Somewhere along the line, content became confused with volume. More posts, more formats, more channels. We automated. We templated. We scaled.

Behind every campaign is a graveyard of unused visuals, and behind every rebrand, a mess of legacy assets. Behind every DAM system rollout lies an uncomfortable truth: technology alone doesn’t solve the problem – it's the strategy, structure, and stewardship behind it that makes it work.

Most marketing teams focus on producing content. A smaller number think about distributing it. Fewer still invest time in how to organise, structure, and sustain it.

However, this is where real value lives: in reuse and repurposing, alongside cross-market deployment, rights protection, and brand consistency over time.

If your content isn’t findable, it isn’t usable. And if it isn’t usable, it’s not an asset, but simply digital clutter.

The rise of the content wrangler

Enter the content wrangler. This is not a job title you’ll find on every org chart. It’s a title we’ve coined as an adaptive response to an increasingly essential market need.

Content wranglers sit at the intersection of creative, operational, and legal concerns. They understand metadata as well as aesthetics. They see the bigger picture, not just the parts. And they can ask the tough questions that many creative teams avoid:

• Do we own this image?
• Has it been tagged correctly?
• Can we reuse it next year, in another market, on another platform?
• Can your content be futureproofed?

This isn't about slowing down the creative process. It's about making sure the content we create today doesn’t become tomorrow’s liability – or worse, tomorrow’s forgotten asset.

Why this matters now

We’re at a tipping point. As AI begins to automate content generation at scale, the real competitive advantage will lie in how organisations manage content, curate it, and ensure its longevity.

In a world of abundance, the ability to sort, interpret, and strategically deploy content becomes the differentiator.

Content wrangling isn’t about nostalgia for order. It’s about protecting brand equity, enabling speed, and reducing risk. Crucially, it’s about putting systems in place to support creativity – not to stifle it, but to sustain it.

A call for better questions

This is not a rallying cry for more consultants or bigger systems. It’s a call to start asking better questions about existing content, and how to treat it with the strategic care usually reserved for budgets, media plans, and product launches.

The content is there. We are here to wrangle it.