- £2.0–3.4m
- Annualised production efficiency, proven on live briefs
- −30 to −70%
- Cost per asset, with 2x to 5x more assets produced
- 3–4 mo
- To self-funding, with the capability owned in-house by month six
A leading UK online retailer's content studio, rebuilt
- Sector
- ONLINE RETAIL · DATA, AI & CONTENT
- Capability
- Data, AI & content
Challenge
A £6.76m studio cost base that could not scale to meet a structural shift.
Content is now made for three audiences at once: the customer who buys, the platform algorithm that decides who sees it, and the AI assistants increasingly answering the question of what to buy. Meta and Google reward volume and variety rather than one hero asset, and on a media budget of £40m to £60m the studio is the largest lever the business holds. The advantage also compounds, because every cycle of better creative teaches the platforms and sharpens the next one. None of it scales by hiring.
Solution
A six-month programme that rebuilt content production as an AI-powered operating system, running on live briefs from week one.
Two engines sit at the centre. An AI content factory produces across three tiers: human craft leads on branded and campaign work, AI works to human direction on paid and always-on, and ecommerce and feed content runs highly automated. An agentic brain connects business goals, audience signals, platform rules and performance data into decisions about content type, volume, hooks and angles. Around both we built the workflow, governance, approvals, asset management and reporting to run it at scale. Six proof-of-concepts covered ecommerce automation, campaign extension, resizing and a briefing agent, each measured against baseline on cost, volume, speed, quality and adoption, reviewed monthly with a scale-or-retire decision by month six. Three enablers covered training, leadership engagement and the data, IT and legal groundwork. Efficiency came first and performance second. Releasing 15% to 25% of studio capacity against the £6.76m cost base carried most of the saving, total annual value lands at £3.25m to £7m once performance upside is counted, and the capability was owned in-house by month six rather than rented.
