Coca-Cola. Heinz. Rite Aid. Places where the creative brief ruled and the only necessary sign-off was a gut feel from the right VP. Where speed was so important it became an end in itself; you moved fast, you published more, you got it to market, and you sorted out details later. Volume was king.
I lived and breathed those environments for years. And then I landed at Sanofi.
The first few months in a regulated commercial marketing operation felt like driving with the parking brake on. Everything, every piece of content, every claim, every word and turn of phrase, had to run through the Medical, Legal, and Regulatory (MLR) process before it could ever touch a healthcare professional, patient, or consumer.
I was initially convinced the constraint was the problem. It took the better part of a year for me to understand the MLR constraint was, in fact, a stroke of genius.
What I didn't anticipate was that the rest of marketing would ultimately face the same problem pharma had been systemizing for years and that they'd be caught unprepared for how to manage it all.
For much of marketing history, content was expensive to produce, which made production the bottleneck. This forced marketers to be judicious in what they created because every piece of content was a significant investment in both time and money. But then generative AI came along and blew the doors off the factory. Production suddenly became inexpensive, content creation became easy, and the bottleneck shifted. Now the question isn't whether you create content; it's whether you can control it and who is accountable for its governance.
Knowing what's approved, what's accurate, what's current, what's reusable, and what’s been quietly modified by an AI system that invented something out of thin air are the questions today. And pharma has been solving this for years.
The regulated companies that adapted by working with the constraint rather than against it built the very operational structure the rest of marketing is now scrambling to create.
They built the library before they built the campaign
In most organizations, content creation works like this: A need is identified, a brief is written, an agency or internal team creates the content, and then the approval process begins. For regulated industries, this sequence always results in an expensive traffic jam.
Pharma, however, reversed the process. Instead of creating from scratch every time, they built libraries of pre-approved content modules. These libraries are structured collections of claims, supporting copy, references, and visuals that have already been approved and are then pulled and reassembled into channel-specific experiences without initiating a brand new approval cycle for each piece. This modular approach was designed to scale content without overwhelming the review process.
Novo Nordisk is a good example of an early organization that leveraged modular content for massive growth. They grew their content library form a few thousand assets to over 30,000 while also shortening review; ceasing to act like a traditional creative department and started to act like a manufacturing operation.
The point about shifting toward manufacturing principles is critical. You can’t achieve massive scale by simply telling people to work harder. You scale by having an approved system for what claims are authorized, what modules are reusable, and what rules govern the entire process. In short, they built the factory before they built the product line. Most marketing organizations never had a reason to consider this before, but now they do.
Review became a design input
In many organizations, legal and compliance review is something that happens to content after it's made. It's the last gate before publish, which makes it the most expensive time to discover a problem.
Sanofi and others in pharma flipped this. They integrated MRL review into their content architecture with tiers of review built directly in. This architecture was designed to minimize review time for each individual piece of content by ensuring that only pre-cleared components were included. Review went from bottleneck to design constraint, something you engineer around at the start rather than suffer through at the end.
When the constraint is built in early, better decisions are made sooner. You don't fall in love with copy that can't withstand scrutiny. You don't spend three weeks on a visual that gets killed by legal. You edit before you invest, which is a much more efficient way for a content operation to run than what most marketing teams are currently doing.
Measurement wasn’t an afterthought
Modular systems also facilitate something most content operations struggle with: traceability. When every content module has an identity, every claim can be traced, each variation leaves a fingerprint, and each performance signal can be tracked.
Measurement ceases to be a post-campaign reporting exercise and becomes an integral part of the system infrastructure. The system learns because the system remembers. This is a fundamentally different approach than publishing first and then trying to piece together what happened from a dashboard nobody trusts.
Change management got funded too
Perhaps the least glamorous lesson in all this may be the most critical one: Real transformation happens with people, not the tool itself. Organizations that have won in implementing these content operations invested heavily in changing how MLR teams, agencies, marketers, content creators, and analytics teams worked together.
Boehringer Ingelheim's implementation is a great illustration of what should never be relegated to an afterthought. The transformation was presented as a simultaneous people, process, and technology shift rather than a sequential one. Getting every stakeholder, from MLR teams to agencies of record to analytics functions, to actually work differently was the project. The platform was what made the new behavior possible, not what produced it on its own.
When content transformations fail, it's almost always due to lack of change management. The tool is implemented but the behavior stays the same. Boehringer funded both and it's why their rollout held across markets.
What the rest of marketing could choose
None of what pharma built required a mandate from a regulator. The MLR process was simply the urgency that drove the change. The pre-approved library, the upstream review design, the structural measurement, the change management investment: any content operation in any industry could make these choices.
Most don't because without a forcing function it's easier to keep creating, keep reconfiguring, keep publishing, and call the churn a "content strategy." Volume feels like momentum right up until you look at what's actually landing; with a lot of it being haphazard. And now that AI has made volume easy and cheap, the organizations that never built governance infrastructure are beginning to find out what that decision cost them.
Freedom can feel efficient at a small scale, but at a massive scale freedom becomes chaos. And the parking brake that I flagged as slowing down the car? It was always there to ensure the system remained controllable once everyone learned how to drive 150 miles per hour.
*** Views expressed on Push Pull Pivot are personal and shared in an individual capacity. They do not represent those of any current or former employer ***