GatherContent joins Bynder to take ContentOps to the next level

by Janus Boye

While we have been producing digital content for more than two decades, Content Operations (ContentOps) remains an emerging practice which many organisations haven’t yet fully taken to heart. There’s related terms like content strategy, there’s plenty of tools that look at topics like content marketing, but what about the actual operations of your digital content?

To address the challenges that come with content operations at scale, there’s a shift happening in the tech landscape, or more specifically in your content toolstack. Creating content on the web is far from the same as it used to be just a few years ago and the recent acquisition of GatherContent by Bynder, signals stronger future investments in this area and perhaps the arrival of next level content operations.

Angus Edwardson and Alice Deer, the two GatherContent co-founders seen together in this recent photo with Bob Hickey, CEO at Bynder

Let’s take a step back from the recent news and look at how the industry has evolved since GatherContent was founded in 2012.

The world has been focused on delivery more so than management

At the Boye Philadelphia 2012 conference, industry veteran and CMS Expert Deane Barker gave his now famous talk titled The Future is in Delivery. As you can see on the summary slide below, he considered content management a solved problem and predicted an increased focus on delivery.

This is exactly what has happened in the past decade. Vendors like Adobe, Sitecore, Optimizely and others have focused on managing the experience “across multiexperience customer journeys” as industry analysts Gartner calls it.

To quote another industry veteran Jeff Cram in his recent update on the GatherContent acquisition:

What's remarkable is that the mid market and enterprise content management systems (Adobe, Sitecore, Ektron, Drupal, Episerver, etc.) did not (and could not) offer anything remotely as simple or easy to use for these critical upstream capabilities.

And as he wrote in a follow-up while working on this analysis:

It wasn’t just that they were bloated, they ignored a key part of the market for a long long time.

So, while most of the attention was going into delivery, personalisation, customer journeys and other requirements, GatherContent slowly, but truly, built a business and a software to better support content collaboration and management.

What’s the deal with GatherContent and Bynder?

Moving onto the recent deal, I’ll start by another quote from Jeff Cram:

GatherContent entered the scene offering a very simple and straightforward capability—helping users prepare, create, structure, organize, and migrate content from one place to another. Content strategists and web authors loved it for its simplicity, utility and function.

Their original positioning was very much against bloated content management systems, which tended to care little about their actual users, typically editors working in corporate communication or marketing. Some even called them a pre-CMS, while the team at GatherContent went to great lengths, from their roots in Scotland, to make sure they were not seen as a CMS.

In their own words back then, they were a website planning tool focused on content organisation. They were working on an ‘easy way to manage content development’ and started by actually gathering content for website projects to the offshore industry.

Bynder is actually only a year younger, dating back to 2013, and also comes out of a digital agency background. The initial problem they tried to solve was the inefficient methods for sharing marketing content. Rather than looking at the CMS world, the Bynder journey was in the almost parallel universe of digital asset management (DAM).

Fast forward to today, and Bynder has grown to over 450 employees and focus on what they call DAM 3.0 or to quote:

the creative content engine that brands need to power personalized digital experiences.

For now, GatherContent continues as a separate brand, and we expect the additional sales and marketing muscle to further act as a catalyst for increased adoption.

Show me your content stack

In our community, there’s hardly any peer group meeting without the mention of the tools. Even among the most senior strategic leaders, we talk about how to navigate the marketplace, or specifically, the software marketplaces that best meet the evolving needs.

Scott Brinker, editor of the chiefmartec.com blog, first published a map of the marketing technology landscape in 2011 containing approximately 150 vendors. Over 10 years, that landscape has grown exponentially to include thousands of solutions from all around the globe. As he called it in 2020: Martech 5000 — really 8,000, but who’s counting?

In an exclusive member call as a follow-up to the acquisition, Angus Edwardson from GatherContent leaned on the MarTech 5000 to focus on the content tools commonly used - or as he called it: The Content Stack

This slide was used by Angus Edwardson, when he presented the acquisition news in an exclusive member call. As expectedly, GatherContent is in the middle

Noticeable on the slide is not just the amount of different tools, but also the term workflow used right in the middle. Let’s dive a bit more into that.

There’s something about workflow

Workflow was long regarded as an inside joke by many CMS experts. The feature that was most often sold and almost never used. Also, workflow doesn’t seem to fit with being simple and straightforward as Jeff Cram described the roots of GatherContent.

Nonetheless, this is probably one of the most substantial differences between CMS and DAM. When you work in a digital asset management system with marketing assets, approvals and workflows do matter.

Also, in recent years, we’ve seen GatherContent emerge from this simple tool focused on a few jobs-to-get-done, to become a more full-fledged content operations platform. In a content operations platform, workflow is quite important.

This transition of digital content workflows from a sales feature to a real critical feature is far from isolated to Bynder and GatherContent. Sitecore acquired Stylelabs in 2018, which also came with workflow and in December 2021, Optimizely acquired Welcome. The press release said:

“Integrating experimentation and optimization into content lifecycle management via a single workflow will make us better marketers, creating a real impact on business growth.”

It would seem, that while trends like headless and MACH have received more attention from analysts, workflow has become a critical part of digital operations.

More perspectives on Bynder + GatherContent

Besides the press release with the announcement, there has been some good industry coverage as well, including:

What’s next in content operations?

While this probably won’t be the single event that makes Content Operations mainstream, a quick look at the competitive landscape shows that Content Operations is on the radar screen of many software vendors right now. The continued dramatic increase in content is just one of the reasons for this.

In the joint Bynder and GatherContent press release, Alice Deer at GatherContent has this noteworthy quote on what their content operations focus is right now:

Now we are elevating that vision and enabling teams to collaborate on creating structured content, enabling mission critical KPIs like content time to market, content SLAs and content readiness - across all of their channels and content types.

In the US and UK, we’ve seen an explosion in ‘Content designer’ as a job title and this helps shifting focus to the management of content. Still, if asked about content operations, many organisations don’t have an established practice and way of working. Alongside better tools, that would be the next level.

Learn more about content operations

We’ve covered GatherContent extensively in the past and will continue to follow their journey. Among some of the recent posts that have shaped our thinking on the topic are:

Besides doing some more reading, you can naturally network and learn in our peer groups. We have a few relevant to this topic, including CMS Experts, Content Ops, Digital Communication and Digital Leadership.