Every week, some earnest marketer, usually with a budget smaller than my weekly grocery bill, slides into my DMs. The question is always some flavor of: “Chris, should we be doing programmatic content?”
Here’s the thing: asking if you should “do” programmatic content is like asking if you should “do” cooking. It’s a meaningless question without context. Are you talking about throwing a frozen pizza in the oven, or are you talking about a multi-course meal prepared by a Michelin-starred chef? The term “programmatic content” has been poisoned, cheapened to mean “fast and pre-packaged.”
Let’s be clear: the good stuff isn’t just not cheap; it requires a significant investment in engineering, data, and talent. It’s the opposite of the digital junk food most of the industry is peddling. The moment you mention the need for actual investment, for a real kitchen with sharp knives, you see the light drain from their eyes. They thought they’d found a loophole, a hack. They thought they could get a gourmet reputation on a fast food budget.
They’re wrong.
What most people call “programmatic content” is a race to the bottom, a digital landfill of worthless articles. But let’s chart the spectrum of what this could actually look like, from the nutritional equivalent of a gas station hot dog to a real, value-creating culinary experience.
The Ladder of Content Sophistication (Or, How Not to Serve Your Customers Garbage)
Level 1: The Microwave Dinner. Most people think of this: you plug a keyword into a LLM and ask it to write an article. This isn’t content. This is reconstituted leftovers. It’s the digital equivalent of putting parsley on a frozen meal and calling it "gourmet."
Level 2: The Line Cook with a Recipe. A slight step up. You’ve fed your brand and product guidelines into a project. You give it a topic. It spits out something that follows the recipe, but is as soulless as a chain restaurant salad bar. It’s still a machine mimicking, not creating.
Level 3: The Sous Chef with a Prep List. Now we’re getting somewhere. You’ve given the machine a structured outline, the mise en place. You’re starting to inject some strategy. But it’s still just assembling ingredients you’ve laid out. It lacks spontaneity, that spark of genius that separates a good dish from a great one.
Level 4: The Head Chef with a Full Pantry. Here’s where it gets interesting. You’ve set up a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) system. You’re feeding the machine your case studies, your research, SME’s POVs, and more. The machine is now armed with your finest ingredients. This is where you can start to see glimmers of real value.
Level 5: The Human-and-Machine Kitchen Brigade. This is where the magic happens. You’ve built a complex workflow where humans and machines work in tandem. The machine does the heavy lifting, the chopping, the simmering, and the initial plating. The human provides the clarity, the strategic flavor pairings, and the final presentation. This isn’t about replacing chefs; it’s about giving them the best, most equipped kitchen in the world.
Level 6: The Multimedia Food Critic. You’re not just creating articles. You’re using the core insights to generate compelling visuals, scripts for short-form video, and social media copy. You’re thinking like a media company that owns the entire food chain, from farm to review.
Level 7: The Molecular Gastronomist. You’re not just cooking; you’re reverse-engineering the science of taste. You’re analyzing what the LLMs are sourcing, what your competitors are serving, and building a system that’s always one step ahead. You’re not just following trends; you’re creating them.
Level 8: The Final Taste Test. A human, a real, thinking, breathing person, takes a final pass. They add the nuance, the unique flavor that no machine can replicate. They ensure it’s not just good, but exceptional.
Level 9: The Relentless Pursuit of a Michelin Star. This isn't a one-and-done meal. It takes months of testing, recipe development, and refinement to get the output just right. It's a commitment to continuous improvement.
See the difference? The "$20 an article" crowd is stuck at Level 1, serving microwave dinners. They’re creating digital noise. The real opportunity, the real alpha, is in climbing this ladder. But that requires non-working dollars, the kind of investment that makes most CFOs break out in a cold sweat.
The question you need to ask isn’t “Is programmatic content a good idea?” It’s “What level of quality are we willing to invest in, and what is the return on that investment?”
And let’s be brutally honest: does programmatically fleshing out thousands of pages for every conceivable keyword actually add value? Is this content genuinely different and compelling enough to make a real person stop, read, and most importantly, open their wallet?
More often than not, the answer is a resounding no. It’s a vanity metric, a way to show your board a chart that goes up and to the right, without any real impact on the bottom line.
Programmatic content, when done right, isn’t about being cheap. It’s about scaling excellence. It’s about empowering your most creative people to do their best work, not drowning them in a sea of mediocrity.
So, the next time you see a tool promising to “simply upload your docs, enter a topic, and we’ll take care of the rest!” – run. Be better than that. Your brand, your customers, and your shareholders will thank you.
Great content and cheap are, and should always be, an oxymoron. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
Written by Chris Sisco
Chris has over 15 years of experience in digital marketing, working with both small local businesses and Fortune 100 companies. He has won numerous awards and mentored some of today's leading industry experts. When not immersed in digital marketing, Chris enjoys playing board games, hockey, and writing poetry.
