Even AI-Driven Marketing Needs a Backbone – Enter the Content Marketing Platform

Picture this: A chief marketing officer at a global retailer opens her dashboard to review the latest campaigns. In one country, a brand team is juggling six different tools just to plan, create, approve, and publish their content. Now zoom out – there are 1,000+ marketers in 100 countries managing 200 brands. Each team has its own patchwork of apps and workflows. It’s a maze of assets, approvals, and analytics, held together by spreadsheets and a hearty dollop of goodwill. Now add a dozen new AI-powered tools into the mix – each promising miracles, and each adding to the chaos.

For John Kirk, this scenario is all too familiar. John, who is chief strategy officer at Inspired Thinking Group (ITG), has spent years helping brands untangle their content operations. The explosion of AI tools in marketing, he warns, is making this complexity unsustainable. “If we thought it was challenging to get data delivered consistently, coordinated, and controlled across an enterprise, AI is going to amplify that problem,” John tells me. In his view, the industry is at a crossroads. That is, AI could either solve everything or – without the right foundation – “it’s probably going to complicate everything.”

CMOs today are facing nothing short of a storm when it comes to content demands.
Marketing teams are expected to deliver:
— More personalised content for ever-narrower audience segments
— More assets across a proliferation of channels and formats
— Faster turnaround to ride real-time trends
— Strict brand consistency worldwide
— Unified messaging across siloed teams and markets, and
— All of this with demonstrable ROI and efficiency gains.

As John points out, “We need things to be more personalised, we need more of it, we need it faster, brand-compliant, unified, and driving ROI." It’s certainly a daunting checklist. John explains that many organisations have answered piecemeal – implementing a digital asset management (DAM) here, a workflow tool there, maybe a content scheduling app or an AI copywriting assistant.

These tools can solve specific problems, but they don’t talk to each other very well. Data gets fragmented across systems. Teams reinvent the wheel in each market. Content operations become a sprawling puzzle, where efficiency gains in one corner lead to bottlenecks in another.

Now, with the rise of generative AI, the stakes are even higher. Every week seems to bring a new AI tool that writes copy, designs images, or personalises videos. Each promises to save time or money, and some do – in isolation. “Having multiple tactical AI deployments is great because it will provide pockets of efficiency,” John says. “But truly, it’s probably creating enterprise inefficiency and many other risks that go with it." These puzzle pieces don’t add up to a coherent AI strategy – in fact, they could drive costs up and governance down. Without a central backbone, AI can turn into just another source of siloed complexity.

What is a Content Marketing Platform (CMP)?

This is where the Content Marketing Platform, or CMP, enters the story. A CMP is the unifying hub for all marketing content operations. “CMP is a category of martech… all about end-to-end marketing content operations,” explains John. “What it is intended to do is go from planning or content strategy all the way through to: ‘Did my assets perform in channels?’ It’s wholly horizontal.”​

The CMP isn’t another point solution – it’s the connective tissue that links everything together, from the first brief to the final results. According to John, a true CMP brings together several core capabilities under one roof. It provides “a place you could go to understand your brand and your campaigns, to plan your work and produce work, to review and approve, to generate content, to store your assets, to distribute content, and get insights. That’s a CMP backbone.”​

Instead of marketers hopping between a half-dozen systems and spreadsheets, they have one platform that supports the entire content lifecycle:

— Content Strategy: Define audience personas, content plans and journey maps to inform marketing campaigns.
— Planning and Workflow: Manage content plans, briefs, tasks and collaborate on content creation across teams.
— Review and Approval: Streamline feedback and sign-offs with clear audit trails.
— Content Generation: Create and adapt text, images, video, and more – including leveraging AI tools – within the platform.
— Digital Asset Management: Easily store, search, and retrieve all assets from a central library (with multi-level metadata).
— Omnichannel Distribution: Publish and deliver content to all channels (web, social, email, in-store screens, etc.) and advertising platforms directly from the system.
— Analytics & Insights: Track performance of content and campaigns, to maximise ROI and inform future activity.

“Rather than having one human log into seven systems to do seven different jobs – and that’s amplified by having 1,000 humans logging into 70 different systems – picture all of the humans logging into one platform,” John says. He likens it to the way enterprises standardised on suites like Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. “We are effectively the Microsoft Office 365 of marketing” in terms of a unified ecosystem. The CMP becomes that single source of truth and work for content teams – a marketing department’s operating system.

In a single stroke, an organisation can plug advanced AI capabilities into every campaign and team, because the groundwork (the data, content, and workflows) is uniformly in place. “If a team does it well and it’s plugged into a CMP, literally, it’s a switch to be able to release that AI tooling to any team in any brand in any market.”​

Converting Chaos to Coherence

The idea of a content marketing platform isn’t a theory. Inspired Thinking Group (ITG), via its Storyteq platform, has been pioneering this space – not by chasing shiny objects, but by steadily building a solution to marketers’ real problems. “We’ve been quietly getting on with it for a long time,” says John about the years of development they’ve been undergoing in content automation and AI​.

Storyteq’s one-platform vision has earned it recognition alongside marketing technology giants. In Gartner’s 2025 assessment of marketing tech, Storyteq was named a Leader for Content Marketing Platforms, rubbing shoulders with companies many times its size. “We are leaders in vision for content marketing,” John explains, citing Storyteq’s position among billion-dollar players like Adobe, HubSpot, and Sprinklr. In his eyes, that edge comes from thinking differently about the problem and focusing on the underlying content infrastructure rather than just flashy tools.

CMP sets the stage for AI to be integrated at scale. “Storyteq is the go-to platform for content marketing,” John tells me – and with everything already in one place, “the real power is it’s the ‘vehicle for AI in marketing’." All those users, assets, and performance data in a CMP create the ideal conditions for AI. “If your Storyteq CMP contains all of your marketing users, all of your agency user interactions, all of your digital assets, and all of your projects and brief data… for every brand, in every market, in every category globally – hello, why wouldn’t I just add AI into the backbone of my marketing operations and the CMP?” says John.

It’s important to note that ITG’s Storyteq CMP was born in the age of AI, making it what John calls an AI-native system​. This means AI isn’t an afterthought add-on; it’s woven throughout the platform. The team designed Storyteq to integrate with best-in-breed AI models and even to let clients “bring your own AI." In practice, a marketing team using Storyteq could leverage the platform’s built-in AI capabilities or plug in a proprietary AI model of their choice – all within the secure, controlled environment of the CMP. By having the CMP as the backbone, brands ensure trust, governance, and privacy around AI use. The system can enforce brand rules, usage rights, and compliance checks on any AI-generated content. As John puts it, using a unified platform “delivers trust, provenance, and privacy… it also keeps you within AI governance." For risk-aware CMOs, that governance is as important as the productivity gains.

In a single stroke, an organisation can plug advanced AI capabilities into every campaign and team, because the groundwork (the data, content, and workflows) is uniformly in place. “If a team does it well and it’s plugged into a CMP, literally, it’s a switch to be able to release that AI tooling to any team in any brand in any market.”

Perhaps just as important as the tech, though, is the people aspect. A content marketing platform doesn’t replace creativity or strategic thinking – it elevates it. By automating the tedious tasks and connecting all the dots, a CMP frees marketers to focus on big ideas and storytelling, rather than hunting for the latest logo file or resizing images for the tenth time. It creates a more sane, enjoyable work environment for teams. And it ensures that when AI is applied, it’s done in a way that empowers people instead of confusing them. “Done properly, in a consistent, standardised, controlled way, the entire enterprise does benefit,” says John. Individuals, teams, departments, and divisions all stand to gain something when they’re supported by a platform that handles the heaviness of operational lifting.

Something Worth Chasing

The bottom line for CMOs is this: to truly harness AI in marketing, you need a strong backbone. A Content Marketing Platform provides the structure and single source of truth to manage content at scale. It turns disjointed processes into a well-oiled machine, so that when you plug in the latest AI innovation, it actually moves the needle instead of adding new fractures. John speaks with the kind of passion unique to someone who’s seen both the messy middle and the promise on the other side. He’s optimistic, but ever grounded in the earth beneath his feet. “We are quietly confident – confident that CMPs like Storyteq can make marketing smarter and more human at the same time​,” he tells me.

After all, the goal isn’t to churn out content faster for its own sake. It’s to free marketers and creatives to do what they do best – crafting stories and experiences – supported by an intelligent backbone that handles the rest. And that’s the kind of AI-driven marketing revolution worth chasing.