Written by Jason Ing, chief marketing officer at Typeface
Every brand wants its moment. The Big Game. A viral trend that lights up social feeds. In theory, this should be the golden age of real-time marketing. AI tools can generate content in seconds. Distribution channels are instant. Audiences are always online.
And yet, when the moment arrives, many of the biggest brands struggle to respond.
New research from the Typeface Signal Report reveals why. In a survey of more than 200 marketing professionals, teams experiencing burnout were 230% more likely to say their brand misses cultural or viral moments.
The issue isn’t a lack of creativity or ambition. It’s the growing gap between how fast culture moves and how marketing organizations are structured to respond.
AI raised expectations without changing how teams work
AI has unquestionably changed marketing. According to the report, 87% of marketers say AI helps them create content faster. Demand for rapid-turn content continues to rise, with many marketers now expected to produce new assets weekly or even daily.
But speed in content creation doesn’t equal speed to market.
Consider what happens in practice: A cultural moment emerges on a Sunday evening. A creator uses AI to draft a timely, on brand response in minutes. The piece then enters the approval process. In organizations with more than 1,000 employees, 71% need more than a day to approve real-time content, with 27% saying they need more than a week.
By the time approvals clear, the conversation has moved on. The content that would have generated significant engagement on Sunday evening gets minimal traction on Tuesday morning.
This is the paradox of modern marketing: AI accelerated the one part of the process that was already relatively fast. The bottleneck was never creating the first draft. It’s everything that happens after — the layered approvals, disconnected tools, and workflows designed for quarterly campaigns, not real-time response.
The hidden cost of hesitation
One of the most revealing findings from the report wasn’t about technology at all. When asked why they don’t act in real time moments, marketers consistently cited concerns about maintaining brand quality and staying on message, especially when multiple stakeholders are involved.
This hesitation is rational. High-visibility moments carry real risk. A misstep can spread just as quickly as a successful campaign.
Nearly two-thirds of marketers said these concerns cause them to slow down or play it safe.
The result is a pattern many CMOs will recognize: teams default to generic content that won’t offend anyone but won’t stand out either. Or they simply don’t participate in the moment at all.
For example, one consumer brand had a clear opportunity to respond to an unexpected, positive athlete moment in 2024 that aligned perfectly with their brand values. The creative team developed strong concepts quickly. But navigating approvals across brand, legal, and communications took two days. By the time the content was cleared, the cultural conversation had shifted. The eventual post received a fraction of the engagement it would have generated in real time.
The safe choice ended up costing the opportunity entirely.
Burnout is becoming a strategic liability
The human cost of this environment is measurable. Sixty-three percent of marketers report feeling burned out by the pace and volume of content creation. Midlevel managers, who typically execute real-time work, report the highest levels of strain.
This isn’t just a morale issue. Burnout directly affects business outcomes. Teams under sustained pressure are more likely to miss opportunities, limit localization, and avoid experimentation. Over time, that erodes a brand’s ability to show up consistently in the moments that matter.
The dynamic is clear: executives read that AI makes content creation faster and increase volume expectations accordingly. But the approval workflows remain unchanged.
Marketing teams are now processing 10 times more content through the same organizational structure they had five years ago.
You can’t automate your way out of that mismatch.
What the faster brands do differently
Typeface’s research points to a meaningful opportunity. Brands that perform better in real time moments tend to focus less on adding more tools and more on how their systems work together.
Here are some examples of what this looks like in practice:
- Empowering smaller decision-making units. One retail brand created a rapid-response team of three people spanning creative, brand, and legal. This group has the authority to approve social content without escalation, meeting for 15 minutes daily. They reduced their approval process from three days to under two hours.
- Establishing clear boundaries upfront. Instead of reviewing every piece of content in the moment, leading teams invest time creating comprehensive brand guidelines, approved tone examples, and pre-cleared messaging territories. This allows creators to work confidently within defined parameters rather than seeking permission at every decision point.
- Integrating tools to reduce handoffs. The most time-consuming workflows involve manual transfers between systems — copying content from one platform, moving it to another for approvals, then to a third for distribution. Each handoff creates delay and introduces error risk. High-performing teams use integrated systems in which content creation, brand assets, and approval workflows are connected.
When these structural changes are in place, AI shifts from being a point solution for drafting content to part of an integrated system that helps teams manage complexity, generate variations, and respond in real time without burning out the people doing the work.
The advantage goes to the organizationally nimble
Cultural moments are becoming more frequent and more fragmented. Audience expectations for brand responsiveness continue to rise, and the competition for attention has never been fiercer.
The brands that succeed in this environment won’t necessarily be those with the most sophisticated AI tools. They’ll be the ones that redesigned how people, processes, and technology work together — so when the moment arrives, teams have both the capability and the organizational structure to act on it.
The question for CMOs isn’t whether your team can create content fast enough. It’s whether your organization can actually ship it when it matters.
This post was created by Typeface with Insider Studios.
