Canto’s The State of Digital Content report examines how content and creative teams are scaling production while dealing with operational friction across disconnected tools, workflows, and repositories.
The research data in the fourth-annual report, developed in partnership with Ascend2, shows how much measurable business impact fragmentation in content and creative operations is having right now. When digital assets are poorly managed within their organization, respondents reported employee frustration or burnout (44%), wasted or misused budget (39%), duplicated or redundant work (38%), missed revenue opportunities (35%), and delayed campaign launches (35%).
The report identifies a strong performance divider tied to connectivity. Content and creative teams with full connectivity between product content and digital assets were over four times more likely to report significant improvements in content ROI over the past year, at 56% versus just 13% for teams without full connectivity.
Comments from Canto’s Jen Neary
The State of Digital Content 2026 shows that the cost of fragmentation is concrete, and it shows up in wasted spend, duplicated work, and frustrated teams, said Jen Neary, Director of Content & Communications at Canto
“Content and creative teams are under so much pressure right now to move faster across more and more channels while still keeping brand and product information accurate,” said Neary. “It also shows a clear path forward. When brands centralize assets and connect them to product content, it becomes easier to govern what is current, update information quickly, and reuse work instead of recreating it. The result is better execution, stronger consistency, and more measurable ROI.”
The Report by the Numbers
The use of AI has been a positive experience to a majority of respondents: 54% of teams using AI for asset search say locating assets is “extremely easy,” compared to only 6% of teams who are not using AI. This is despite only 35% of respondents feel very confident employees are always using the most up to date, approved version of brand assets
Conversely, teams using two or more solutions to manage digital assets were more likely to report delayed campaign launches (40% vs 24%), missed revenue (40% vs 26%), burnout (49% vs 34%), and wasted budget (44% vs 30%) than teams using one solution. And only 32% can update content or product information across channels immediately (defined as real time or same day). Most teams need a few days (43%) or up to a week (19%).
Faster content updates correlate with stronger revenue outcomes as 65% reported significant revenue increases, versus 16% among teams with slower update timelines. And over 80% of respondents reported their brand plans to increase content and creative budgets in the year ahead.
Additional findings from this year’s report include:
- Product content is still managed in messy ways. Respondents most often rely on a website CMS (54%) and spreadsheets (51%) for product information, followed by internally-built systems (39%). Only 38% reported using a more centralized structured approach.
- Product content consistency is breaking down. 88% of teams struggle to keep product content consistent across channels, and 56% still manage product information separately from the digital assets used to market and sell products.
- Teams know what would help most. Top improvement opportunities included making product data easier to access (38%), eliminating duplicate or outdated product data (37%), and managing product data alongside creative assets (37%).
The online survey of over 400 professionals focused on content and creative asset production, management, or strategy for those located in the United States and United Kingdom. The State of Digital Content 2026 is available now for download here.
