Perspective
Kristofer Berg
Every content operation has a few people who make things work. They know which partner needs the brief twice. They know the file naming convention that was never written down. They know the approval will stall on Thursday, so they send it on Tuesday.
They are the reason the deadlines are met. They are also the reason nobody can see what is actually wrong.
This is the part of the problem I think the industry has refused to look at. We talk about content operations as if the failures were visible: the missed deadline, the wrong version in market, the campaign that shipped late. Those are rare, because competent people prevent them. What is not rare is the work done to prevent them, and that work is invisible by design. It happens in Slack messages, in weekend catch-ups, in a call someone makes because they know the system will not carry the information on its own.
We call the thing those people are absorbing content drag.
Content drag is the resistance a content supply chain has to overcome to move work. Not the work itself. The friction around it: the file being looked for because the metadata did not travel; the brief explained a third time to the same partner, the subtitle data retyped because two systems do not talk.
Drag gets converted into human effort the moment it appears, which is exactly why it never reaches a report. The handoff that should have failed did not fail, so nothing was logged. The only trace is how tired the team is and how much of the operation lives in four people’s heads.
That conversion is why the common diagnosis is wrong. When an operation cannot go faster, the explanation offered is almost always capacity: not enough people, not the right tools, not enough budget for the peak. It is a comfortable explanation, because it has a purchase order at the end of it.
But an operation running at its limit on absorbed drag does not get faster when you add capacity. It gets a larger version of the same shape. More people mean more handoffs, which means more drag, which means more absorption. Organisations discover this after the headcount arrives and the throughput does not move. Some of them conclude they hired the wrong people.
The same logic explains why improvement projects are disappointing. Most organisations have already fixed something: a new DAM, a better review tool, a cleaner workflow for one campaign. Each one worked where it was measured. Then the friction turned up at the next handoff, with the next partner, in the next market.
That is not a bad fix. It is what happens when you improve one workflow inside a supply chain that has fifteen. Drag relocates rather than disappears, and because improvement is measured locally, the relocation is not recorded anywhere. An organisation can complete six successful projects and feel no faster, with six sets of green metrics to show for it.
Seeing this requires holding the whole chain at once, and almost nobody is positioned to. The chain runs through marketing operations, production, procurement, agencies, and localisation partners. Each of those owns a genuine piece of it. None of them owns the joins, and the joins are where drag lives.
Zero content drag is our attempt to make it visible before someone absorbs it.
It is a framework that names the friction so it can be counted rather than carried. Nine forms so far. At the handoffs: waiting, chasing, hunting, retyping, re-deciding. Inside throughput: queueing, switching, absorbing, cutting corners. If you run an operation, you will recognise all nine, and you will know which of your people handles or oversees.
On the name. Nobody gets to zero, ourselves included. There will always be a late partner and a file in the wrong folder. Zero is a standard, not a promise, in the way manufacturing has used zero defects for decades without anyone reading it as a guarantee about the next unit off the line.
I should be direct about our position in this. Orb spent 31 years as the absorption.
In production, post production and adaptation, we were the people at the gaps: moving files, correcting metadata, catching handoffs before they dropped. Clients paid us to make the friction invisible, and we were good at it.
That is a defensible business. But it is not a cure for the client’s problem, just a band aid. Every hour we spent absorbing drag was an hour that removed the evidence it existed, which is a strange thing to be proud of once you see it clearly.
So, we are going to look for it instead. In the supply chains we work in and in the new people we meet.
Over the coming months we will publish what we find: the patterns, the forms we have not named yet, and conversations with people who have been carrying this longer than they would like to admit.
To be continued.
Kristofer Berg
kristofer.berg@orbgroup.com