Think about how much content your organization paid to create last year. Now think about how much of it is still doing any useful work.
Chances are, there's a sizeable gap between those two numbers.
A CreativeX analysis found that 52% of the core creative assets in its dataset were never activated at all. Based on its analysis, CreativeX estimated that an average Fortune 500 company could be wasting at least $25 million a year producing creative assets that never reach an audience.
Most companies won't be wasting $25 million. But the underlying problem should be familiar: organizations invest heavily in creating content, give it a moment of attention, and then move on.
A report launches. A webinar happens. A customer story gets published. The campaign ends. Then everyone gets back together and asks the same question: What should we create next?
That question might be costing us more than we think.
We Treat Publishing as the Finish Line
Most content operations are built around getting something out the door.
There is a brief, a deadline, a production process and a launch. Success means publishing the thing. Once that happens, attention quickly shifts to whatever is next on the calendar, there's always another campaign, another deadline, another piece of content to produce. So once something is published, we tend to consider the job done and move on.
But think about what went into creating it. A piece of content may have taken weeks of research, interviews and specialist expertise to produce. Publishing it once doesn't mean you've extracted all of that value. It only means you've finished the first version.
And when organizations don't have a good way to find and reuse what already exists, they don't simply miss opportunities to distribute it. Worst case is, they start doing the same work again.
APQC research found that the average knowledge worker spends 8,2 hours a week looking for, recreating and duplicating information and expertise, including two hours specifically recreating work that already exists elsewhere in the organization.
That research isn't specifically about marketing, but the underlying problem is highly relevant. If it's easier to commission, research and produce something new than to find and adapt something useful that already exists, starting again becomes the path of least resistance.
That's an expensive habit.
"There's a lot of value locked up in content that companies have already spent time and money creating," says Peder Bonnier, CEO at Storykit. "We tend to put all our energy into getting something published, and much less into what happens afterwards. I think there's a huge opportunity in changing that."
AI Could Make the Problem Worse
This becomes more important as AI makes content production faster, and marketing teams are already under pressure to produce more:
Deloitte Digital research found that content demand had increased by 54%, while marketers using generative AI reported saving an average of 11.4 hours per week.
Those efficiency gains are useful. But they also raise a question: What happens if we get dramatically better at producing content without getting any better at using it?
Well, we create more, faster, while preserving exactly the same disposable model.
Much of the conversation around AI in marketing has focused on generation: how quickly we can produce another post, video, image or variation. But reducing the cost of production doesn't solve the waste problem. If anything, it makes it easier to ignore.
The more interesting opportunity is to use AI to extend the useful life of what an organization already knows.
Stop Thinking in Finished Assets
This requires a small but important change in how we think about content:
A webinar isn't only a webinar. It's an hour of source material.
A research report isn't only a PDF. It's a collection of findings, arguments, examples and expertise.
Once you start looking at content this way, repurposing becomes less about recycling old assets and more about finding valuable ideas that deserve to reach more people
Take a one-hour conversation with an internal expert and a customer. AI can help transcribe and structure it, surface interesting moments and make it much faster to work with the material. Human editorial judgment can decide what is actually worth saying, find the strongest angles and determine how those ideas should be expressed.
Some might become short videos. Others might work better as LinkedIn posts or an article. And when the subject becomes relevant again six months later, the original conversation is still there as source material.
That's very different from taking an old asset and simply reposting it.
It also changes the economics of content creation. The expensive part – the expertise, research, access and original thinking – doesn't have to be purchased again every time you need something to publish.
Make Reuse the Default
None of this requires a six-stage content lifecycle or a complicated utilization formula. It requires building reuse into the content process from the beginning.
If you're investing in a report, an expert interview, a webinar or a customer story, the plan shouldn't end with the first publication. You should already be thinking about what else the material could become, which ideas could stand on their own, and how you can get more value from the work you've already put in.
That doesn't mean squeezing twenty assets out of everything you create. Some content has a short shelf life. Some ideas only work in their original context. And some things simply aren't interesting enough to deserve another version.
The point is to make that decision deliberately rather than automatically moving on as soon as something is published.
That means treating reports, recordings, interviews and other source material as something you expect to work with again. It means identifying strong ideas while they're still fresh, planning repurposing as part of the editorial process, and making it easy to turn those ideas into the formats and channels where they make sense.
This is where Storykit fits. As an AI-native content partner, we combine technology with human editorial expertise to identify the useful ideas in an organization's source material and turn them into social content across formats.
The aim isn't to produce more for the sake of producing more. It's to make sure that when you've invested in something worth saying, you get more than one chance to say it.
The Next Brief Might Already Be Written
Marketing teams will always need to create new things. But “new content” and “new thinking” don't have to mean the same thing.
We've spent years optimizing the machinery for producing more. AI will make that machinery dramatically faster. The bigger opportunity may be to become much better at recognizing the value of what we've already produced.
Because the waste isn't really that there are old files sitting in a shared drive. It's that useful ideas, expertise and stories are sitting there with them – while someone, somewhere in the organization, is writing a brief to create them all over again.
