Rebranding overnight without the chaos: what CMOs can learn from Odido and Storyblok

Every CMO knows the feeling. The brand work is done, the campaign is ready, and then the website becomes the bottleneck. Pages need a developer, changes wait for the next release, and a launch date starts to look less like a plan and more like a hope.

A customer story from Storyblok, the headless content management system and a regular partner of our CMO summits, shows what it looks like when that problem is fixed before the big moment arrives. It describes how Odido, which Storyblok calls the largest mobile telecom provider in the Netherlands with more than 8 million customers, moved off a 20-year-old CMS and then launched a complete rebrand without a hitch.

The problem was the way people had to work

According to the case study, Odido had run a traditional enterprise CMS for more than two decades. It was file-based and deployed by FTP. Editors worked in production, developers worked in separate non-production environments, and everything had to be bundled into versioned releases and pushed out by hand.

Storyblok puts it plainly: there was no dramatic crash, just a slow build-up of friction. When work from the two groups was finally merged, content went missing, versions clashed and launches stalled.

That will sound familiar to a lot of marketing leaders. The issue is rarely one broken tool. It is a set of workarounds that slowly takes over the team's week.

The editors had a vote

Odido spent four months on the search. A shortlist of suppliers pitched, and editors, developers, architects and business leads all had a say. The must-haves were a headless, API-first foundation, the stability of a SaaS product, and an editing experience that did not feel like a punishment.

Several platforms met the technical brief. What decided it, according to the story, was that the editors liked Storyblok best.

"We made our editing team a real part of both the selection and implementation process. That was a real benefit in terms of user acceptance," said Walter van Parera, Principal Engineer at Odido.

For CMOs, this is the first lesson. The people who publish every day are the ones who make or break a platform change. Bringing them into the choice early is not a courtesy. It is how you get adoption without having to force it.

Then the rebrand arrived

Partway through the rollout, the project grew. The company was preparing a complete rebrand and a new digital identity, which had to go live across thousands of pages and a redesigned website with no room for error. Several teams of editors and developers worked in parallel, migrating content and building a new design system, while the existing site stayed live until launch day.

It went smoothly. "When the new brand was launched, we were fully on Storyblok for our CMS needs, and the launch went flawlessly. We even ran a notoriously difficult, large yearly sales event several days later, also without a glitch," said van Parera.

The second lesson is about timing. A rebrand is the worst moment to discover that your website cannot keep up. Getting the content foundations right first meant the brand team could focus on the brand.

What changed

The case study lists the results:

• Publishing workflows are twice as fast, with changes going live up to three times faster.
• More than 30,000 content objects and 50,000 assets were migrated.
• More than 100 people across editing, development and the wider business now work directly in Storyblok.
• The site scales through peak campaigns and major sales events without downtime.
• New editors get up to speed in a fraction of the time the old system needed.

There is a marketing gain here too. "Thanks to the integrations and APIs, such as with VWO, our work has become not only more efficient but also more enjoyable and engaging. We can now approach content from a CRO perspective, which noticeably improves the quality," said Sven Vermeulen, Senior Content Manager at Odido.

When editors can publish in hours or minutes rather than days, they have time to test and improve pages instead of just getting them live.

Why this matters now: content debt

Storyblok has also been looking at the wider cost of slow, messy content. In research carried out with FT Longitude, it surveyed 550 senior executives at companies with revenues of more than a billion dollars. According to Storyblok, the average enterprise spends 105.4 hours a week on content maintenance, and 34% of total content spend goes on fixing content debt: content that is out of date, poorly structured, not set up for search or AI discovery, and hard to update. The research also found that 69% of executives agree that improving their content strategy is more of a technical challenge than a creative one.

That last figure is worth sitting with. Many marketing teams still treat the website as something the IT team owns. Odido's story suggests the better results come when marketing, editors and developers choose and run the platform together.

Storyblok is now building on this with Storyblok Agents, launched in September. Content teams can ask the CMS to find content that is stale, duplicated or missing translations, act on it in the same conversation, and schedule agents to handle recurring tasks. The company says the agents work within each user's permissions and approval.

Four questions for your next planning meeting

1. How long does a simple page change take? If the honest answer is days, that is time your team is not spending on campaigns.
2. Who chose your current platform? If your editors were not in the room, ask them what slows them down.
3. Could your site handle a rebrand or a peak campaign next month? Find out before you need to.
4. How much of your content is out of date? A content audit is dull work, but content debt has a cost, and it grows quietly.

The bottom line

Odido's rebrand is a good reminder that brand moments depend on plumbing. The team did the less glamorous work first, gave its editors a real voice and built on a stable platform. When launch day came, the new brand simply went live. For CMOs heading into 2027 planning, that is a better place to start than another round of workarounds.

Sources

• Storyblok, "How Odido Rebranded Overnight and Transformed Content Operations, Cutting Publishing Time in Half" (customer case study, updated 16 October 2026): https://www.storyblok.com/cs/odido
• Storyblok, "Storyblok Introduces Storyblok Agents to Enable Teams to Have Conversations With Their Content and Automate Tasks in the CMS" (press release, 10 September 2026): https://www.storyblok.com/mp/introduces-storyblok-agents
• Storyblok and FT Longitude, "Content Debt: A $4.63 Trillion Business Liability" (research report): https://www.storyblok.com/lp/ft-longitude-content-debt-report

Image: MART PRODUCTION on Pexels (Pexels License).