From content collapse to content breakthrough: How marketers can thrive in the age of AI

Great marketing starts with people, the voices behind the brand and the imaginations that make audiences feel something. 

Over the past year I’ve met with hundreds of customers and partners who’ve described to me a recurring pattern: budgets are tighter even as expectations rise, low-quality “AI slop” is crowding channels, and top-of-funnel discovery is shifting. 

We heard the same signals when we partnered with Atlantic Insights, the research arm of The Atlantic, to survey 425 marketing professionals around the world. The results point toward a “Great Content Collapse,” and, more importantly, how teams are breaking through.

In this post, I’ll share where the pressure is coming from, and how we’re building Contentful to help marketers turn these constraints into momentum.

Budgets are tighter, but expectations are rising

According to a recent Gartner report, 39% of marketing executives sought to cut labor spend this year. That’s not new. There’s always been an ask of marketers to do more with less. What's new is assuming AI is going to solve for all the budget cuts. 

We know from Atlantic Insights, for example, that AI investment is a priority for marketers, with 74% investing in the technology and 34% allocating at least $500k toward AI marketing tools or initiatives over the next 12-36 months.

That might lead to a temptation to automate everything. The real opportunity, however, is to standardize how work gets done so people can focus where they create the most value.

When outputs are measured against outcomes—and when the system supports repeatable, high‑quality work—teams can scale productivity without sacrificing quality.

At Contentful, we aim to automate and eliminate marketing toil. Even the best-in-class experience platforms today require multiple handoffs between marketing, design, and engineering teams, from internal teams to external agencies. 

AI automations in Contentful are deeply embedded within your existing content workflows, so that marketing teams can now automate much of the busywork that occupies so much of their time. Let’s liberate them, so they can focus on the creative aspects of marketing that truly differentiate your brand.

The Contentful MCP server goes even further; our implementation of the Model Context Protocol standard allows large-language-model (LLM)-based agents to interact with business systems in a predictable, structured way.

“The Contentful MCP makes repetitive content management tasks significantly easier, saving me from mountains of manual updates. Beyond that, the possibilities it unlocks — like natural language queries, content generation, and even multi-system orchestrations — are huge. It’s an exciting time to be working with it!”

Leah Wilson-Duff, Senior Product Manager, ZoomInfo

When AI output turns into AI slop, quality and connection suffer

One consequence of budget constraints is how brands have radically scaled their content production through AI, assuming that more content will ultimately equal more clicks. But this approach has backfired. The web is now flooded with low-quality content that’s fast, cheap, and disposable. 

Consumers have gotten wise to this. Studies show that 81% of consumers ignore irrelevant marketing messages. Elsewhere, a 14% decline in purchase consideration for products advertised alongside content perceived as AI-made. When AI is used to ship content on autopilot, the result may be polished but emotionally flat. Audiences can tell. Trust erodes, and engagement follows.

What we’re witnessing is a vicious cycle: low-quality AI content leads to a drop in engagement, prompting brands to churn out even more content in a desperate attempt to catch up. But this strategy has created a situation where both consumers and AI algorithms ignore this flood of mediocrity.

For those teams feeling the pressure to produce more with fewer resources, the fix is a human-in-the-loop model that protects the parts of the process where judgment matters most. 

Enter the full-stack marketer

In our work with Atlantic Insights, we’re excited to see the next generation of marketer step forward: the full‑stack marketer. 

These are people who combine curiosity, empathy, and analytical thinking with the right systems. They use AI to accelerate research, localization, and adaptation, then apply human perspective to set direction, ensure brand fidelity, and raise the bar on originality.

In those terms, the skills that matter most today are digital experience design (40%), followed by personalization strategy (37%), and prompt engineering (37%). There’s also a shift toward data-driven creative instincts: 33% of marketers rank campaign testing and optimization as a top skill.

Teams that blend human perspective with machine speed build stronger connections because they protect the spark that makes content worth reading in the first place.

We’re supporting this by democratizing the kinds of tasks that historically required specialized teams. You shouldn’t have to engage a specialist team to run an experiment, for example. Deeply embedded capabilities within Contentful for content analytics and experimentation are powered by natural language and purpose-built for a full-stack marketer. 

“We need to imagine a more positive alternative future that's created by AI. We can start in our jobs right now and make that happen, because we shape technology. It shapes us, but we can't forget that we also shape it.”

Joy Howard, Chief Marketing Officer, Back Market

Top-of-funnel discovery is changing, and how to respond

AI has rewritten the rules for content discovery. As tools like Google Discover, ChatGPT, and other AI-powered systems grow, traditional SEO-based strategies for pulling in top-of-the-funnel content are quickly becoming obsolete. Instead of fighting for the top blue link on search results, brands now need to show up inside generative answers to specific prompts. 

That shift, called generative engine optimization (GEO), rewards originality, depth, and verifiability over volume alone. The brands that break through invest in primary insights, express a clear point of view, and maintain consistency across product docs, help content, and thought leadership so engines can verify the source.

But to be that nimble and precise, you need greater acumen: 40% of marketing leaders told us that measuring effectiveness and ROI is one of their top challenges. And in another scenario where nearly half of our respondents rank data analysis and interpretation as a top skill, marketers must now demonstrate breakthrough creativity and validate with data. 

Marketers can protect the pipeline with content strategies that work for both GEO, making the content easy for AI platforms to parse and cite in conversational responses, as well as SEO. 

At Contentful, we aim to be the best experience platform for both humans AND agents. Many of you have heard us describe Contentful as loved by both developers and marketers. As we enter the age of AI, a great experience platform also needs to be loved by agents — it has to have all the right primitives, the right tools, and access to the right data to support AI workloads. 

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How AI makes marketers more human

So, how do we navigate the great content collapse? As our research confirms, the key to success is understanding how AI can complement human creativity, ensuring that content is not just abundant, but meaningful, relevant, and valuable to your audience. 

After all, as Contentful CMO Elizabeth Maxson told us at the beginning of the year, whether you are a B2B or B2C company, customers still expect (and deserve) a business-to-human experience.

Our most successful customers are treating AI as an accelerator, not an author, and publishing original perspectives that engines and audiences can verify. They’re investing in systems that standardize how work happens, so their people get time back to think, test, and create. 

This is the work we’re doing at Contentful: A platform that blends composability with native AI so you can deliver high‑quality, personalized content in the moments that matter. If you’d like to see how these capabilities fit your roadmap, get in touch so we can talk about your goals in more detail. 

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