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Why marketing teams are busier than ever but getting less done

12 0
02.12.2025

Creatives and media teams have never been more “on.” Calendars are packed, Slack never sleeps, and there’s a tool for every micro‑task. Yet campaigns are taking longer to ship, not shorter. Creative teams spend more time managing work than making it; media teams wait on assets; approvals multiply. This busy-but-slow paradox is real – we’re busier than we’ve ever been, but collectively, our work is moving at a snail’s pace. 

Part of the pressure is structural. Consumers still devote, on average, about six hours a day to media and entertainment, and that number isn’t growing. We’re all competing for a fixed window. In a zero‑sum attention market, operational drag is an existential risk. In Australia, Deloitte’s latest data reveals consumers are paying more for entertainment while spending less time on screens. This is the second consecutive year of decline. Fewer minutes, higher expectations and more fragmentation mean campaigns have never had to be more on-point and in-place. 

Over the last decade, our industry has optimised the parts of the process (production, QA, trafficking) without fixing how those parts connect. The result is friction in between those parts. Teams are sprinting hard on their leg of the relay. The problem is that the baton they’re passing keeps changing.  

What’s missing is a unified end‑to‑end workflow that can become an industry-wide standard. This needs to be a workflow that connects planning to activation. A single, data‑assisted workflow that unites creative, compliance and media, automates the repeatable work and preserves human judgement where it matters. All with the goal to move ideas cleanly from brief to live without losing quality or governance........

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