Why marketing teams are busier than ever but getting less done
Marketers have never been busier… or slower. Despite an explosion of tools promising efficiency, campaign cycles are stretching longer, approvals are piling up, and creative teams are spending more time managing work than making it. The problem isn’t effort; it’s friction. Teams are moving fast individually, but disconnected systems and endless sign-offs mean the collective machine is grinding to a halt. Andy Gilroy, vice president of APAC, Cape.io, explains.
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.
Where it all went wrong and how to make it better
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.
