Beyond Digital Twins:
Building a Governed Synthetic Content Pipeline
Synthetic content programmes fail when technology and transformation exist in isolation. This white paper explains how Grip's production-grade platform and ICP's hands-on implementation work in tandem to turn digital twins into enterprise-scale content supply chains.
Digital twins are becoming commonplace in consumer goods and retail. Yet a twin on its own does not solve the enterprise problem: producing high volumes of compliant, consistent content across SKUs, markets, retailers, and channels, at pace and without repeated rework.
Rather than treating digital twins as the end goal, organisations should treat them as the foundation of a synthetic content supply chain. In this model, pre-built and approved 3D packaging assets, built from real pack structures and packaging artwork, become source of truth assets. These assets are assembled into scenes through a governed pipeline of codified art direction, versioning, automated rendering, and QA. The goal is to scale content confidently without only relying on large language models to improvise pack shots and products. The result is a repeatable, auditable production system that increases speed and coverage while reducing brand risk.
Before & After: What Actually Changes?
Before: Tactical employment
In most large organisations, digital twins begin as a tactical efficiency play. A limited number of hero SKUs are modelled to reduce photoshoots, speed up e-commerce readiness, or to support campaign adaptations. Budgets remain high because the underlying operating model does not change.
Before a governed synthetic pipeline, organisations typically experience:
- High fixed content budgets driven by manual production and rework
- Fragmented ownership, with packaging, brand, ecommerce, and creative teams each optimising locally
- Inconsistent outputs at scale, despite approved brand guidelines
- Repeated approvals, because every new image is treated as a new creative risk
- Limited reuse, where each campaign, market, or retailer restarts production from scratch
At The Coca-Cola Company (TCCC), this model resulted in annual content budgets exceeding $100M to create and maintain GS1-compliant pack imagery and related product content across markets. Despite that investment, speed, coverage, and consistency remained constrained by manual workflows and repeated validation cycles.
Digital twins existed, but they did not fundamentally change how content was produced, governed, or owned.
After: A Governed Synthetic Content Supply Chain
When digital twins are repositioned as source-of-truth inputs into a governed production system, the economics change dramatically.
At TCCC, the introduction of Grip’s synthetic production model, combining approved 3D packaging twins, codified guardrails, and lights-out execution, reduced the required annual budget for GS1 content, while increasing catalogue coverage and consistency.
This shift was not driven by replacing people with AI. It was driven by replacing project-based production with a repeatable, auditable system.
After a governed pipeline is in place, typically organisations could see:
- 80% cost reduction versus traditional photography-based approaches
- 6× lower adaptation costs for campaigns and localisations
- 3–5× faster content turnaround from artwork approval to channel-ready delivery
- Near-total catalogue coverage (95%+ of SKUs) rather than selective hero coverage
- First-time-right outputs, reducing review cycles and legal rework
- Predictable marginal costs, where adding SKUs or markets no longer scales linearly with spend
In this model, content production behaves like packaging production: governed, versioned, and trusted.
