Senior marketers are operating under an “efficiency illusion,” with the average advertising campaign taking more than five months and significant resources to execute while 48% of campaigns fail to meet KPIs – according to new research.
The report by AdSapiens, the platform revolutionizing ad design, optimization, and tracking, polled US senior marketers about their current strategies, tools, and perceptions around AI. It found that fearing AI has led to senior marketers simply avoiding it, even on tasks that take up hours, and in some cases days, of their time.
This is having a direct knock-on effect on the success of advertising campaigns. Marketers cite quality assurance (29%), format adaptation (27%), and language translation to be the three main limitations that stifle progress, while the main barriers to optimization and improvement include a lack of resources (46%), a lack of technology (46%), and an absence of benchmark data (44%).
Despite marketers citing a “lack of resources” as a barrier to improving their campaigns, the same marketers reported an average of 19 people involved in each ad campaign they run. This is evidence of a dynamic whereby marketers feel restricted despite having more than enough time and resources dedicated to each campaign.
Adding to their challenges, nearly half of marketers (47%) report spending a “moderate” amount of time on scaling campaigns across different formats and languages, while more than a quarter (27%) admit to this taking a “significant” amount of time – this is despite the fact that ad formatting adaptation can now be easily automated.
Incredibly, despite the challenges and frustrations of marketers, the vast majority of them (92%) claim to be “satisfied” with the efficiency of their creative advertising process, revealing a significant misalignment between how marketers think they are performing compared to how they are in reality.
“Our landmark research has revealed some alarming truths about the way ad campaigns are being resourced and executed,” says Chris Allan, CEO of Adludio, the firm behind the AdSapiens platform. “It’s immediately apparent that marketers are operating under an efficiency illusion, seemingly satisfied with their own and their team’s output, despite spending a disproportionate amount of time and team resources on every campaign they deliver.”
Allan continued: “It’s time senior marketers woke up to the realization that this is not a sustainable approach, particularly when lengthy processes like ad formatting adaptation can now be automated at the click of a button. We’re calling on brands and their marketing teams to reconsider the way they resource and execute their campaigns – it’s time to embrace automation to free up valuable time, set a new standard for the industry, and unlock a huge competitive advantage.”
AdSapiens’ survey polled 400 marketing and advertising decision-makers at US brands with more than 500 employees and an annual revenue of between $100-500 million, to offer a comprehensive view on the current state of AI in advertising.
For more such updates, follow us on Google News Martech News