Australia ranks second globally for content demand growth, as marketers turn to AI to survive the content explosion.
What’s happening: New Adobe research shows 86% of Australian marketing teams have experienced increased content demand over two years, with 63% expecting their content needs to multiply fivefold by 2027, ranking Australia second globally behind India.
Why this matters: Marketing teams are spending nearly half their time on administrative tasks rather than strategy, whilst 83% lack effective ways to measure content performance, forcing organisations to fundamentally rethink their content operations and AI adoption strategies.
Australian marketing teams are bracing for an unprecedented surge in content demand, with new research revealing the nation ranks second globally for content pressure, trailing only India in the race to meet escalating consumer expectations.
Adobe’s survey of over 400 marketing practitioners and leaders found that 86% have seen demand increase in the past two years, with more than half reporting growth of five times or more. By 2027, 63% of Australian marketers anticipate their content needs will multiply by at least fivefold.
Content Crisis Hits
The surge stems from consumers demanding highly personalised experiences across expanding formats and platforms. Personalised content demand tops the list of drivers at 61%, followed by hybrid customer journeys at 49% and the shift toward video and audio formats at 42%.
Most marketers say their audiences now expect new content weekly or several times per week, with 48% admitting they’re struggling to keep pace. This aligns with broader shifts in Australian consumer behaviour and expectations that have emerged in recent years.
The scale of production has become staggering. Most organisations produce over 1,000 brand assets annually, with more than a third creating between 10,000 and 500,000 assets.
Workflow Bottlenecks
Administrative burden compounds the challenge. Time-consuming workflows plague teams, with most having more than 20 approvers in content processes and materials going through three to six approval rounds. Almost half of marketers spend more than 40% of their time on administrative tasks, reviews and approvals rather than core content creation and strategy.
Budget shortfalls affect 46% of teams, whilst 44% cite lack of speed and 31% point to limited staff as top challenges. Most concerning, 83% of marketers have no effective way of measuring content performance.
Duncan Egan, Vice President of Enterprise Marketing at Adobe Asia Pacific and Japan, said: “Marketers are under immense pressure to deliver personalised, impactful content at speed and scale. To keep up, teams must rethink their operations, unify creative and marketing workflows, and leverage AI to accelerate ideation, production, and personalisation.”
AI Adoption Accelerates
Marketing teams are turning to artificial intelligence for relief. Most teams (78%) already use AI to support content production and workflows, with 82% planning to implement AI for content processes within the next year.
However, hesitation persists around quality and compliance. Marketers express concerns about content quality (56%) and compliance and data privacy (48%) when considering generative AI adoption.
“As brands embrace AI for content production, they need models that they can trust,” Egan said. “That is why we train our Adobe Firefly models on licensed, high-quality data to ensure commercial safety. We also enable organisations to train their own custom models so they can create on-brand content at scale.”
Industry Voices
Practitioners across sectors are adapting workflows to manage demand surges. Juli Anderson, Director of Brand & Creative for Australia and New Zealand at AECOM, described managing content across a 55,000-person global workforce: “We had comms people, marketing people, designers, and then our internal stakeholders requesting things like social media tiles that we needed to streamline. We needed to work out how we would make this content a lot more consistent and on-brand and polished.”
Stefan Mitchell, Head of Video Content at Nine, highlighted AI’s immediate impact in sports content: “Being able to cut down an 80-minute NRL game into a five-minute highlight. Previously, it was one person’s job. They had to sit there and watch the whole game, cut all the bits up, edit it together and publish it. So that will take two hours plus. Now, with AI, as soon as the game’s over, there’s a five-minute highlight reel ready to go.”
Yet human oversight remains crucial. “Our philosophy towards AI is that it has to start with human and end with human,” Mitchell said. “We cannot rely solely on AI to output creativity or to speed up efficiency at the expense of the human workforce without understanding why and understanding how to drive it from start to finish.”
The research, conducted in June 2025 by Adobe in partnership with Advanis, surveyed professionals across marketing, advertising, creative design and customer experience roles representing companies from small businesses to large enterprises. The Australian survey formed part of a global study encompassing 2,800 respondents from the US, France, Germany, India, Japan and the UK.
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