The end result of a campaign matters. That’s a given. But it’s not just the output of a campaign that’s critical to marketing success. Oftentimes, the way a marketing team creates content impacts the end result. The creation and distribution process can impact: go-to-market speed, efficiency of resources, ability to be agile and strategic, and ultimately ROI.
And while the way marketing teams create content has never been more critical, it’s also never been more complex. As pressure mounts to deliver more campaigns, hone personalization, and adapt to an AI landscape, the creation operating model a marketing team uses to create content is now a key competitive differentiator.
At Stensul, we’ve worked with some of the world’s leading enterprise marketers, and we’ve identified four primary Creation Operating Models: Distributed, Design to Code, Brief to Template, and Self-Serve with Guardrails.
First, we’ll define what a Creation Operating Model is, walk through these three models, explain why they matter, and discuss the future of all three in an AI-focused world.
What is a creation operating model?
Simply put: A creation operating model is how an organization structures its internal workflow from creation to deployment, primarily focusing on the processes, people, and technology.
Essentially: how a marketing team goes from idea to output.
Different orgs rely on different models, depending on a variety of factors including: in-house technical talent, design resourcing, volume, complexity of creation, size of team, etc. There are pros and cons to each (more on those later!). And for years, many of the models have served teams well. But the fact of the matter is: Today’s creation operating models are flat out broken.
On average, it can take more than two weeks to get a single email out the door. Even the most efficient teams still take more than 4 days to get a single email out. Not only is that inefficient, but in a world now fueled by AI creation, personalization, and instant gratification, speed-to-market is simply non-negotiable.
Inefficient campaign creation from a broken creation operating model:
- Wastes resources
- Decreases customer engagement
- Results in lost opportunities and revenue
Before we get into the fix for the broken process, let’s dive into each creation operating model individually to see which one your team uses.
The 4 types of Creation Operating Models
1. Distributed
Overview:
Where it’s often found: B2B/B2C companies
Who creates content in this model: Marketers
Content time to market: Fast
Key characteristics: High creative flexibility in email content and a quick time to market
The Distributed model gives marketers autonomy, but it’s often at the expense of brand consistency and scalability. With no central control, brand governance suffers and quality can be hit or miss.
Pros:
- High creative flexibility
- Quick time to market
Cons:
- No centralized oversight
- No technical or QA support
2. Design to Code
Overview:
Where it’s often found: B2C companies
Who creates content in this model: Designers and developers
Content time to market: 2–4 weeks
Key characteristics: High brand and creative value and typically strong performance
While this model ensures strong oversight and performance, it makes it challenging to scale as designers face increasing demands to do more with less time and resources. Each piece of content requires specialist resources, which can add length to production time and cost more to higher expert talent—especially in high-volume environments.
Pros:
- Creative flexibility
- Strong oversight
- Higher performance
Cons:
- Slower to market
- Inefficient workflow
- Limited by specialist resourcing
3. Brief to Template
Overview:
Where it’s often found: B2B companies
Who creates content: Ops and campaign teams
Content time to market: 1–2 weeks
Key characteristics: Strong oversight and workflow process
Brief to Template is optimized for control, but it sacrifices agility and creative flexibility. If the templates aren’t perfect or the briefs aren’t precise, delays and rework are inevitable. When there is a new rebrand, updating every template becomes a highly time-consuming, difficult task.
Pros:
- Efficient workflows
- Strong oversight
Cons:
- Limited creative flexibility
- Limited by specialist resourcing
4. Self-Serve with Guardrails
Overview:
Where it’s found: B2B/B2C companies
Who creates content: Anyone (marketers, strategists, even sales)
Content time to market: Less than 1 week
Key characteristics: Scalable, strategic, and agile
Self-Serve with Guard rails is a newer model and one that’s redefining content creation in the enterprise space. By enabling anyone to build on-brand, high-performing content within preset rules, Self-Serve with Guardrails removes bottlenecks, empowers teams, and speeds up time-to-market—without sacrificing governance.
And with the rise of generative AI tools, this model is more important than ever.
Pros:
- Combines speed with oversight
- Enables creative freedom within guardrails
- Supports efficient workflows and governance
- Scales across teams and markets
Cons:
- Requires a shift in behavior and tooling
How (and why) to fix a broken Creation Operating Model
Now that you’re familiar with the different models, let’s dive into why you need to pay attention to your Creation Operating Model.
A broken Creation Operating Model can mean a slow and inefficient time to market. By increasing speed to market, two things happen that ultimately increase performance:
- More personalized emails can be created and sent and increase conversion rates.
- Internal operations resources can be reallocated to analyzing data, optimization and A/B testing to further drive incremental gains.
But in order to achieve this desired state, you need to remove the bottlenecks in your creation process today.
We’ve pinpointed three bottlenecks currently plaguing teams.
The governance bottleneck
Every company needs to have a process in place to manage brand, legal concerns, compliance and QA, but today this is all human-moderated.
The solution to the governance bottleneck is you need to embed guardrails and QA into your technology to reduce technical production and downstream work.
In the Self-Serve with Guardrails Model, built-in guardrails are what makes it possible for creators to produce their own emails without the help from a developer who knows how to fix broken code, an ops specialist who knows all the things to QA for or a designer who has all of the team’s brand guidelines memorized. These specialists are highly valued members of marketing teams whose time is better spent on more impactful tasks than moderating creation processes.
The creation bottleneck
The idea in someone’s head never quite looks the same on paper. As a result, the first version is never quite right, whether a design isn’t rendering properly in the code or a marketer’s copy that isn’t quite fitting into the template. This results in a spiral of back-and-forth conversations, just to get the asset into the approval process.
The solution to the creation bottleneck is freeing up developer time by empowering creators to produce their own emails in a no-code, drag-and-drop builder. Instead of a marketer being an email requester, they become an email creator. Instead of a designer waiting for a developer to code their designs, the designer creates directly in HTML in a no-code builder so they can see their designs in real-time.
In the Self-Serve with Guardrails Model, back-and-forth that occurs in many traditional Creation Operating Models is eliminated, and technical specialists can reallocate their time to more strategic analysis and optimization projects to improve performance.
The collaboration bottleneck
With teams working in all different tools, feedback becomes decentralized, and it takes longer for edits to be made to continue advancing through the process. This leads to endless revision cycles and versioning nightmares.
The solution to the collaboration bottleneck is to make it possible for feedback to happen on the actual asset where the edits are made, similar to many other tools we use today..
In the Self-Serve with Guardrails Model, collaboration happens instantly, in one place.
Creation Operating Models in the age of AI
AI is accelerating the pace of content ideation and creation, but it’s also surfacing a new set of challenges: more content means more room for inconsistency, compliance risks, and collaboration chaos.
Marketers are no longer just fighting against slow workflows—they’re fighting complexity. AI can help generate content faster, but it can’t fix broken processes or disconnected systems. That’s where the Self-Serve with Guardrails model excels.
It brings order to creation, without slowing it down. It lets marketers move at the speed of AI, but with the confidence of built-in brand governance and QA.
Operating models aren’t just process diagrams—they’re productivity engines. Choosing the right one can mean the difference between reacting to change or leading it.
The future belongs to those who can scale personalized, compliant content without slowing down. That future belongs to Self-Serve with Guardrails.
If you’re ready to evolve your operating model, Stensul can help. Request a walkthrough of your current operating model to see how Stensul can help.
