In our first article, we called out the elephant in the room: organisations are scaling content like never before – but no one’s really measuring if it’s working.
Enter Content FinOps: the missing discipline in scalable personalisation. If you haven’t read that one yet, start there. If you have, this is where we go deeper.
This piece lays out the Content FinOps Measurement Blueprint – the what, the how, and the metrics that matter. It’s designed for teams investing in personalisation, decisioning, GenAI, and next-best-action engines, who are discovering the same painful truth:
Personalisation doesn’t fail because of tech. It fails because your content engine can’t keep up – and no one’s tracking the cost of that failure.
Why Measurement Matters Now
Let’s be clear: scaling content isn’t the problem. Scaling content without accountability is.
In our work with FS&I clients, we’re seeing marketing, content, and CX teams drowning in assets – hero videos, modular components, next-best-actions, personalised emails – with little understanding of:
- What gets used
- What gets results
- And what it all costs
Meanwhile, CFOs are asking very reasonable questions:
“Where’s the ROI on all this content?” “Why are we spending £500k per campaign with no usage data?” “Do we even know how much content sits unused?”
This is exactly what Content FinOps is here to address.
Introducing the Content FinOps Measurement Blueprint
This framework brings financial clarity and operational control to the content engine behind personalisation and decisioning. It’s not about penalising content teams – it’s about enabling them to perform better, faster, and more visibly.
Here’s what it looks like:
Strategic Objectives
Aligned to what personalisation and decisioning actually require:
- Efficiency: Lower the cost per personalised asset delivered.
- Performance: Link content output to measurable customer impact.
- Reusability: Drive value by repurposing modular content across journeys.
- Velocity: Reduce time-to-market for assets used in decisioning flows.
- Visibility: Create shared accountability across content, ops, marketing and finance.
Core Metrics That Matter
| Metric | What It Tells You |
| Total Content Spend (£) | Your true investment in content (people + tools + partners) |
| Assets Created | How much you’re producing — and whether it’s manageable |
| Assets Used in Journeys | What’s actually deployed into campaigns, comms or decisioning flows |
| Cost per Used Asset | Your most telling FinOps metric — efficiency of production |
| Reuse Rate by Segment | Are modular assets doing their job across journeys and audiences? |
| Time to Market | How fast you can brief → create → approve → go live |
| Unused Asset Waste (£) | The financial drag of content that never gets used |
| Engagement per Asset | Did it actually drive a click, conversion or uplift? |
| Segment Coverage Gaps | Where content is missing to support key audience journeys |
| Offer Abandonment Due to Missing Content | When decisioning logic fails due to content not being available |
| Average Approval Cycle (Days) | How long it takes to get content through governance |
| Cost of Rework | Time and money spent revisiting/amending content that wasn’t fit for purpose |
| Content Dependency per Journey | Number of content assets required to activate a personalised journey |
| DAM Asset Retrieval Time | How long it takes to find and retrieve approved content in the DAM |
| Workflow Completion Rate | % of briefs/projects successfully moving through the workflow tool |
| Compliance Rejection Rate | % of assets flagged or delayed due to compliance failures |
| Omnichannel Readiness Index | % of campaigns with fully prepared content across all active channels |
| Content-to-Decision Match Rate | % of decisioning offers with appropriate content available |
| GenAI Content Ratio | % of campaign content generated or enhanced by GenAI tools |
| Decisioning Content Latency | Time between decision trigger and content delivery |
| Personalisation Asset Coverage | % of customer segments or personas with appropriate content modules |
These aren’t vanity metrics. These are the numbers that get you budget next year.
Why this Matters for AI, GenAI & Decisioning
Right now, organisations are investing heavily in:
- Real-time decisioning platforms
- GenAI-assisted content creation
- Personalised journeys across channels
All great investments. But they share one fatal dependency:
If the content isn’t there, nothing works.
Worse still – if no one knows what content’s working, you’re scaling the wrong things. Fast.
GenAI might 10x your production. But without Content FinOps, you’ll also 10x your waste.
Where to Start
Here’s the VERY high level steps we recommend to clients:
- Audit your current content pipeline
Map what’s being created, where it’s going, and what’s actually used.
- Run the numbers
Cost per asset. Cost per asset used. Reuse rate. Unused asset waste. You’ll be shocked.
- Build your FinOps dashboard
It doesn’t need to be perfect — but it does need to be visible.
- Start asking better questions
Not “How many assets did we make?” but: “What value did this content deliver?”
“At Optima, we’re focused on helping organisations unlock value – not just through strategy and design, but by embedding the AI capabilities and operational discipline that actually make it scalable,” says Alan Crawley, Founder and Executive Director at Optima Partners.
“Content is at the heart of that value, and it’s often the least measured, least governed, and most under-optimised part of the system. Boards are starting to realise that if they’re serious about personalisation, decisioning, and AI-enabled growth – they need to get serious about Content FinOps too. Our teams at Optima are already helping clients pick this lock – laser-focused on value, outcomes and the financial metrics that matter.”
The future of personalisation isn’t about producing more. It’s about producing smarter.
Content FinOps is how we get there.
It’s not just a framework. It’s a survival tool for content-led growth.
Contact us today to find out more.
