By: Georgette Virgo

“More” has long been the default metric of marketing success—more campaigns, more channels, more assets, more impressions. Many equate growth with volume — bigger budgets and heavier production should translate into greater impact. But what happens when marketing budgets decrease, media costs rise, and competition for attention intensifies? How can brands quantify spend?

This question is particularly concerning for chief marketing officers (CMOs) and procurement leaders at enterprise companies. With demand to expand reach, personalize, and deliver measurable ROI, teams often operate across silos on fragmented projects, without much transparency across the total content supply chain.

With many moving levers and teams stretched, marketing and procurement executives can assume significant value remains trapped in their production systems, locked in silos, duplicated, underutilized, occasionally unseen, and often subject to weak governance. In this reality, it’s getting harder to remain agile while optimizing spend. 

The answer lies in a 360‑degree view into the content supply chain that can be mapped, measured, and optimized. Paired with the right strategy and partner mix, “doing more with less” isn’t a compromise; it’s a competitive advantage.

The Problem: Trapped Value of Marketing Productions

Marketing Budgets Under Pressure

Marketing budgets are under sustained pressure, even while expectations for efficiency and growth intensify. According to the Gartner 2024 CMO Spend Survey, the average marketing budget has dropped to 7.7% of overall company revenue, with many CMOs reporting stagnant or declining resources despite expanding responsibilities. 

At the same time, media inflation, new platform demands, and increasingly sophisticated personalization expectations push content demands sharply upward. The result is a structural squeeze: brands must maintain or improve performance with fewer discretionary dollars and more complex production demands.

Within this squeeze, “trapped value” has emerged as a defining challenge. Trapped value refers to the budget, time, and strategic potential lost to inefficiencies in the content supply chain — money spent on redundant production, rework, emergency fixes, or fines that could have been avoided with better governance and visibility. 

It also includes opportunity cost: the growth initiatives that never get funded because resources are quietly absorbed by avoidable operational friction. This trapped value is highlighted in CreativeX’s Creative Quality Score study, which reveals that businesses lose a whopping $47.8 billion in opportunity when marketing does not perform as intended.  

Pain Points in Marketing Production

Overspend and Inefficiencies

One of the most common and costly manifestations within the marketing content supply chain is overspending that quietly accumulates long before the final budget is reviewed. 

Overspending often begins with fragmented planning: different teams commission similar assets independently, unaware that parallel work is already underway. Campaigns are briefed late, forcing rushed production schedules that carry premium costs, and internal teams work with their preferred agency partners, often veering away from approved resources or in-house teams.

Approvals can move slowly across functions and regions, turning otherwise straightforward projects into drawn‑out exercises punctuated by last‑minute changes. Each delay compounds cost and risk, as production companies scramble to accommodate moving targets while media deadlines loom.

Fragmented processes amplify the problem. When each brand, market, or channel team operates its own tools, templates, and workflows, economies of scale evaporate. Asset reuse becomes difficult when no one has a clear, centralized view of what content already exists or how it can be repurposed. Inconsistent briefing standards and scattered documentation lead to misunderstandings, rework, and scope creep. 

The inevitable result? The quietly eroded value of every production dollar.

The Hidden Tax of Poor Governance

Overlaying these operational issues is an equally costly problem: weak governance. In many organizations, governance is often viewed as a defensive exercise, focusing narrowly on legal sign-offs or basic compliance checks. In reality, poor governance functions as a hidden tax on the entire marketing budget. 

Gaps in rights management and licensing for fonts, imagery, music, or talent can trigger unexpected fees, legal exposure, or the forced withdrawal of live campaigns. The lack of clear rules around asset reuse encourages teams to commission new work unnecessarily, even when suitable materials are available.

The consequences become stark when governance failures surface at scale. Weak controls over font licensing, for example, can leave brands vulnerable to audits and fines that run into the millions, diverting funds that could otherwise support innovation and growth. 

Inconsistent documentation of usage rights can block content from being repurposed across markets or channels, undermining the very efficiencies that 360 production is meant to deliver. These are not theoretical risks; they are recurring realities for large enterprises whose marketing operations have outgrown legacy controls. Without a stronger governance framework, brands pay a premium for the absence of structure.

The Solution: Why 360 Production and Governance Matter

For Procurement leaders, CFOs and MarkOps, unlocking the trapped value in a marketing production is one of the fastest ways to achieve marketing budget efficiency without compromising creative quality or brand ambition.

Collaboration as a Growth Lever

When the pressure of marketing efficiency calls, 360 production and content governance answers. Leading brands map their end‑to‑end content supply chain — a 360-degree production approach that connects commercial, digital, social, retail, and experiential work within a single ecosystem, enabling collaboration across marketing, creative, and procurement teams in ways that unlock value. 

Specialized consultants, such as APR, a global marketing production advisory, play a crucial role in making this collaboration a reality. Positioned as independent advisors, APR domain experts see across internal silos and partner landscapes, helping to identify lapses in governance. They offer solutions on where and how to establish efficient global procurement processes.

APR’s Chief Client Solutions Director, Erin Wilhoite, explains that under this expert guidance, “every aspect of production, from scoping and bidding to delivery and reuse, is measured and checked against industry benchmarks designed to maximize impact and provide value back to brands.” This allows the marketing ecosystem to optimize spend and produce content at scale.

Governance as a Value Driver

We often think of “governance” as the dry, administrative side of business — the red tape that slows down the creative process. But in reality, it’s a powerful tool for protecting a brand’s bottom line. 

Without a clear system to track usage, global brands are increasingly falling prey to digital “crawlers” that hunt for tiny compliance gaps. Seemingly small items like font licensing can be easily overlooked and quickly become legal landmines. 

Recently, several brands have been hit with multimillion-dollar fines for simple font errors. For one global CPG brand, it wasn’t a legal miracle that saved them; it was a rigorous governance strategy implemented by production consultants. APR audited their digital footprint and centralized their licenses, transforming a chaotic liability into a streamlined, protected system that prevented a massive financial risk. 

“When we first looked at the $2 million claim, it was clear this wasn’t just a legal headache — it was a massive financial risk,” says Wilhoite. “By auditing 100s of websites and digging into the fine print, we didn’t just find errors in the claim; we found a way to redirect that capital.”

The real value of governance lies in its ability to turn “defense” into “offense.” By implementing a clear playbook for how fonts are purchased and used, they achieved a staggering 13x ROI on the initial investment for the audit. 

This shift saved the company from pouring money into avoidable legal settlements and redirected the budget into high-impact growth, using those millions to fund new content and innovation. In a world where every marketing dollar is under a microscope, smart oversight is the ultimate value driver, turning recovered capital into the fuel that powers a brand’s next big idea.

Strategic Collaboration for the Future

Let’s face it: brand competition is strict, markets are noisy, attention is scarce, global procurement is complex, and the cost of reaching audiences continues to rise. In this environment, the difference between leading and lagging brands will hinge less on who spends the most and more on who uses their production spend most intelligently. That intelligence comes from treating 360 production and governance as strategic capabilities, not merely back-office functions or line items to be squeezed out.

By embracing a 360-degree view of the production ecosystem, building deeper collaboration among marketing, creative, and procurement teams, and embedding governance into every stage of the content lifecycle, brands can begin to unlock the trapped value in their marketing productions.