![](/sites/default/files/styles/blog_hero_image_mobile/public/media/image/2026-08/From%20Content%20Chaos%20to%20Right-Time%20Relevance_0.png?itok=2qnuFpwJ) Image ![headshot of Jake Athey](/sites/default/files/styles/post_content_attribution_headshot/public/media/image/2025-12/Jake%20Athey.png?h=44650d79&itok=FWYhpEo0) [Jake Athey](/people/leadership/jake-athey) Vice President, Sales and Go-To-Market, DAM and PIM Acquia ## Collection [Digital Asset Management](/blog/series/digital-asset-management) # Content Orchestration: From Chaos to Right-Time Relevance Published: August 10, 2026 Last Updated: August 18, 2026 10 minute read [Share this blog post on LinkedIn ](https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=https://www.acquia.com/markdownify/node/61231) [Share this blog post on Twitter ]() [Share this blog post via Email ]() Most marketing teams have built content operations. Almost none have built content orchestration, the thing that gets content to the right person at the right moment. Jake Athey breaks down what separates the two, with a real customer example of the shift. ![](/sites/default/files/styles/blog_hero_image_mobile/public/media/image/2026-08/From%20Content%20Chaos%20to%20Right-Time%20Relevance_0.png?itok=2qnuFpwJ) ## Collection : [Digital Asset Management](/blog/series/digital-asset-management) ## You Don't Have a Content Problem. You Have an Orchestration Problem. Most marketing teams have built content operations. What they actually need is content orchestration and the infrastructure to make it real. Every marketing team I talk to wants to make more content: more campaigns, more assets, and more channels. And I get why. It rarely fixes anything. The real problem isn’t creation; it’s coordination. You can have a team producing brilliant work and still lose, because nobody can find it, reuse it, or get it to the right distributor in time to matter. Content consultants Robert Rose and Cathy McKnight [have written about this exact shift](https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/strategy-planning/content-orchestration-vs-operations), and McKnight's distinction is the one I keep coming back to: content operations is everyone following their own playbook. Content orchestration is everyone following the same one. Almost every team I meet has built the first, but almost none have built the second. > ***I've stopped asking brands how much content they're producing. I ask whether the content they already have is reaching the right person at the right moment.*** I’ve stopped asking brands how much content they’re producing. I ask whether the content they already have is reaching the right person at the right moment. When you shift the goal from volume to relevance, you usually end up making less. It doesn’t mean you’ve given up; it means you’ve stopped creating content that never had a clear destination in the first place. ## The right content, the right audience, the right moment Content orchestration means the right content reaches the right audience at the right moment, wherever they are. Content operations is about making the content. Orchestration is about what happens after it is made. Rose and McKnight named the shift correctly, and most of the industry has caught up to the idea. Where the model runs out comes down to infrastructure: How does an organization effectively orchestrate at scale, with distributor networks and permission structures, without a small army of people manually routing files? > When it's done right, a digital asset management platform is much more than a filing cabinet; it's the governed source of truth that every channel and every AI tool draws from. That’s the layer I’ve spent most of my career in. When it’s done right, a digital asset management (DAM) platform is much more than a [filing cabinet](https://www.acquia.com/blog/dam-dead-again-and-death-more-important-last); it’s the governed source of truth that every channel and every AI tool draws from. Without it, your brand can spend countless hours defining its ideal operating model in a workshop. You still end up with the same search failures, the same permission chaos, and the same outdated assets sitting next to current ones. Nobody built the system that enforces the model once people go back to their day jobs. ## What the transition looks like Let me make this clear with a real-world example. [Deutsch Family Wine and Spirits](https://www.acquia.com/events/webinars/governing-growth-how-deutsch-family-wine-spirits-turned-their-dam-brand) is best known for its portfolio of brands like Josh Cellars, Prophecy, and Layer Cake. What Deutsch actually is, beneath those labels, is a high-velocity distribution company that moves wine and spirits through a complex network of distributors, retailers, and regional sales teams. Every one of those audiences needs the right content at the right moment to sell. A few years ago, Deutsch had what I'd call a high-functioning mess. It had a DAM and assets lived there, but the system had grown up around a core team of roughly 300 internal users. Nobody had stepped back to ask what happens when you add hundreds of distributors and retailers, each with different permission needs and different definitions of what "approved" even means. The answer was chaos: portal sprawl, search failures, and assets disappearing into shared drives because the DAM couldn't serve the audience that needed them. [I've seen the same pattern](https://www.acquia.com/blog/when-every-step-counts-how-three-footwear-giants-mastered-digital-asset-chaos) play out with footwear brands as they manage digital asset chaos across their distributor networks. > Brands rarely fix their content infrastructure when things are slow. They fix it when they're scaling fast enough that the infrastructure can't keep up What triggered the change was a pattern I see constantly: they grew. Brands rarely fix their content infrastructure when things are slow. They fix it when they're scaling fast enough that the infrastructure can't keep up. For Deutsch, expanding the distributor network was the forcing function. Governance came before technology. Deutsch settled the permission structure, the audience model, the portal architecture, and the metadata taxonomy before reconfiguring anything. Only then did they begin the platform: eight weeks of focused execution following roughly a year of governance thinking. Today, Deutsch has grown from around 300 users to 2,000. The company onboarded 70 new distributors and retailers with full brand and point-of-sale access in four months. Metadata entry, once a drag on every upload, is down to about one minute per product, roughly 300 hours of annual savings from that change alone. The DAM stopped being a file storage system and became a brand distribution engine. Deutsch's team asked one question for every configuration decision they considered, before they ever touched the platform: who needs this and why? Distributors got product images and spec sheets curated for their region. Retailers got approved POS materials and nothing else. Once every audience's access was mapped specifically, the platform decisions were easy. The rebuild moved fast because the governance work was already done. ## Why most teams get stuck in the middle Most teams can describe orchestration, but few can run it. They end up getting stuck. The messiest part is the middle. An organization spends time and money deciding what it wants: who owns what, who can see what, how it organizes things and who its target audience is. Then it hands that plan off to a technology team or implementation partner and assumes the hard part is done. It isn’t. Every one of those decisions still has to get built into the system, permission by permission, field by field, and that takes someone with the authority to make the calls and the time to see it through. > DAM is a verb, not a project. The second messiest part is what happens when the new plan runs into old habits. People have workarounds, e.g., shared drives, email chains, and the good old "just send me the file" Slack message. They created those workarounds because something in the old process was genuinely painful. If the new system doesn’t fix that pain, people will keep routing around it, even when it's objectively better. The teams that get adoption right treat rollout as change management, not just setup. They give the system a name that belongs to the business, not the vendor. For example, ALG Vacations didn’t launch a DAM; it launched ALGB360, its brand portal for travel advisors. Deutsch built DASH. When people can point to something with their own name on it, they treat it as theirs. The other thing these teams do is start with a win for the people who have to change the most, not the people who asked for the project. If the new system is faster and easier in week one than the old workaround, those people become the advocates no training program could have manufactured. The failure I see most often is treating rollout as a single event rather than an ongoing job. Teams hit go-live, declare victory, and move on. Then users upload new assets without any information attached. Portals go stale. The person who drove the launch takes a new job. Six months later, the brand is back where it started, but with a more expensive tool. One of my partners put it well: DAM is a verb, not a project. Zurich Insurance lives by that idea. With 20,000 worldwide users accessing its DAM, none of it stays organized by chance. A dedicated team owns the taxonomy, reviews new uploads, and stays in the loop with the people using the system every day. That’s why Zurich's teams can find an asset in under two minutes now, down from twelve. That speed didn’t happen on its own. Someone stays on top of it. ## AI is only as good as the governance underneath it Vendors use the term "[AI-ready](https://www.acquia.com/blog/what-ai-can-and-cant-do-your-dam)" so loosely that it no longer means anything. Let me make it concrete. A content team is AI-ready when three things are true: Its content is findable and usable by AI. It’s drawn a clear line between decisions AI can make and decisions that stay with a person. And its governance can handle AI-generated volume without breaking down. Many teams are working on one of those three, but very few are working on all three. > AI fertilizes what's already there. Your best ideas grow faster. So do the weeds. The failure point that gets the most attention is over-reliance. Teams use AI to generate content at scale without a clear definition of what "approved" means for AI-generated work. The result is brand drift: assets in the wrong color, product descriptions that don’t match what’s on the shelf, or images that are technically fine but completely wrong for the brand. The AI followed a pattern, but the pattern was the average of everything, not the specific thing your brand stands for. The failure that gets less attention but matters more is underutilization. Teams are sitting on AI tools that could eliminate real manual work, such as generating metadata, catching duplicates, and running compliance checks, yet they aren’t using them. Why? Because no one wants to be the one to leap. One Acquia DAM customer reduced metadata entry time to about one minute per product. That’s real time returned to real creative work. Most systems use AI to describe what's in an image, tag it, label it and catalog it. But what really matters is whether the AI understands what you're trying to accomplish with that asset, not just what's in it. That difference comes from the governance sitting underneath the model, not the model itself. Feed AI a mess, and it doesn't clean the mess up; it speeds it up. AI fertilizes what's already there. Your best ideas grow faster. So do the weeds. ## What's next: the AI-discoverable brand Your audience has changed, and most brands are just now starting to notice. People are asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews about your product, brand, and category before they ever land on your site. What those tools return depends entirely on how you structure your content sources and govern your assets, as well as whether your information appears in sources those engines already trust. > The brands that treated their DAM as a filing cabinet have a problem. Brands that treat it as a content supply chain gain an advantage that compounds over time. Even the most skilled content teams are still building for a known set of channels: web, social, email, and retailer portals. What's changed is who the audience is. Increasingly, it isn’t a person reading your content directly. It's an AI system that reads it on that person's behalf and then decides what to tell them. The brands that treated their DAM as a filing cabinet have a problem. Brands that treat it as a content supply chain gain an advantage that compounds over time. The technology has never been the hard part. The hard part is deciding, as an organization, what your content is supposed to do. Get clear on that, and the infrastructure almost builds itself. Stay unclear, and no amount of technology will save you. Image ![headshot of Jake Athey](/sites/default/files/styles/post_content_attribution_headshot/public/media/image/2025-12/Jake%20Athey.png?h=44650d79&itok=FWYhpEo0) [Jake Athey](/people/leadership/jake-athey) Vice President, Sales and Go-To-Market, DAM and PIM Acquia Jake Athey specializes in digital asset management (DAM) and PIM solutions, powering digital experiences for brands. A speaker and contributor to Acquia's blog and CMSWire, he brings expertise in martech and commerce platforms. [Share this blog post on LinkedIn ](https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=https://www.acquia.com/markdownify/node/61231) [Share this blog post on Twitter ]() [Share this blog post via Email ]() ## Keep Reading [View More Resources](/resources) [Image ![Three blue circular icons showing user profiles, settings gear, and goal target with arrows](/sites/default/files/styles/card_tablet/public/media/image/2026-03/Blog%20Graphic-Thought%20Leadership-The%20Third%20Audience.png?h=8b2987e5&itok=UWFrUcqh) Blog Article 6 min ###### The AI Era Is Rewriting the Rules of Content Strategy AI agents are your content's new audience. Dries Buytaert, Jennifer Griffin-Smith, and Forrester's Chuck Gahun on what that means for your strategy. 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