Brand identity and recognition is driven by a big idea — the ‘Hero’ creative that tells your audience who you are and what you stand for. But, according to our Chief Strategy Officer, John Kirk, for customer engagement and business growth, you need to be amplifying that idea with effective Halo content.
Competitive advantage in marketing is achieved by delivering globally consistent, high-quality content, but also by combining that with local relevance and data-driven targeting. This is your Halo content. It’s the beautiful, channel-specific, localized, personalized variations that bring your hero creative to life everywhere.
In an age of rising costs, exploding channels, and soaring customer demand for increasingly personalized experiences, your ability to produce Halo content will define business success. Campaigns must be activated globally, with highly localized marketing, while remaining on time and on budget. Hero creative remains an important aspect of your campaign, but if you’re not executing it effectively with meaningful Halo content, then it’s not going to reach the right audience, on the right channel, at the right time.
Increasing need for personalized Halo content
It’s no secret that media is now close to full consolidation, with all global brands having access to programmatic (AI-powered) buying and automated audience targeting. Indeed, Statista predict that 85% of UK ad spend will be fully programmatic by 2028.
The result? That the ability to produce the most engaging content — cost-efficiently, at volume and pace — is now the main differentiator between competing businesses.
Allied to this is a shift in demand from customers. Localized, personalized content is a must, with McKinsey reporting that 76% of consumers are more likely to buy from a brand who deliver a personalized experience.
While changing demands from customers aren’t necessarily going to dictate your hero creative, they will impact the way you execute it in different channels and markets — the Halo content.
The days when you could roll out a hero campaign globally with just a few subtle variations are gone. Amidst a barrage of noise, customers have become far more discerning about what they will and won’t engage with. If you put out a generic campaign without a significant effort to target that content, making it as impactful and relevant as possible for each user and channel, your audience will spot it from a mile off.
The graphic below perfectly illustrates the growing role of Halo content in relation to your hero creative.
While hero creative is still clearly vital, Halo content and how it is executed will largely define the success (or otherwise) of your campaigns.
The challenge in Halo content creation
The reason Halo content is now such a defining factor in marketing success is that few brands are able to produce it efficiently and effectively. Traditional content production models simply weren’t built for this speed and scale, which in turn means costs are soaring. Creative agencies do amazing work in the hero space, but when it comes to the bulky, complex content creation that Halo demands, they can’t keep up. And let’s be honest, it’s not the work that they want to (or should) be doing.
You can look at offshoring content production, but any initial savings will tend to be offset by poor service standards — whether that’s increased rounds of amends, slower turnaround times, or reduced brand consistency.
As we’ve said, customer demand and the need for personalization are both on the up. The only way to deliver meaningful, impactful Halo content at speed and scale is to adopt an AI-enabled, agile approach to your content creation.
The right technology platform will help you to automate processes such as briefing, planning, workflows, content versioning, metatagging and more — reducing the burden of manual tasks while delivering smarter, insight-driven, contextually relevant content that connects you with your customers.
For ITG, the driving force behind our Halo content engine is our Storyteq Content Marketing Platform (CMP) — recognized by Gartner® as a Leader in its Magic Quadrant™ for CMPs 2025. It connects content operations across teams, agencies and geographies, automating processes and streamlining the entire content journey.
And by leveraging what we term ‘Halo Intelligence’, whereby key marketing, brand and customer data underpins automated asset creation, Storyteq allows our clients to rapidly translate hero concepts into Halo content that tells the perfect story for every possible user interaction.
From global campaigns to localized Halo content with Haleon
This isn’t a pie-in-the-sky idea that’s years from fruition. It’s happening now, and we’re helping to drive this change for our clients.
Take Haleon. It’s a global healthcare business with many different power brands, operating in numerous markets worldwide — a classic case of the need for effective Halo content.
Haleon was faced with a problem when it came to delivering global campaigns. Central marketing could produce everything to maintain brand consistency, but it would lose the speed. Or, local teams could produce their own content, meaning it would get the speed but not the consistency.
Storyteq CMP has completely changed how Haleon operate, drastically cutting its time to market by connecting its operation on a single system of record, integrating AI to streamline processes, and enabling Halo content creation that increases its global brand recognition without worrying about budgets and timings.
“Working with ITG has changed the way that we realize outcomes from the technology that we deploy. ITG’s ability to deeply understand the problems that we’re trying to solve — not just talk about technologies, but really understand the problems, and focus on that challenge to deliver solutions — has been game-changing for us.”
James Masters, Head of Content & Media Tech at Haleon
The future of Halo content
So, where do we go from here? The future for us is fully AI-driven, intelligent Halo content production. Humans are still absolutely vital in creative ideation, but we can use technologies such as AI to rid us of the mundane, manual tasks (such as content versioning) that bog us down and stop us doing what we really love.
Generative AI will continue to improve, but Operational AI is where we should be focused. That’s AI to streamline workflows, create efficiencies, and solve real-world problems — adding immediate, tangible, and repeatable value within your marketing operations. You can’t automate the human ingenuity that drives all great marketing, but you can make everything around it faster and easier, and that should be encouraged.
It all comes back to Halo content. Activating hero campaigns globally with consistent, data-driven content is the key to brand growth in 2025 and beyond, and those who embrace an AI-enabled, agile approach to Halo content creation will lead the way.
Need a model that translates hero ideas into Halo content — quickly, efficiently, while reducing your costs? Fill in the form below and we’ll be in touch.