How smart agencies & brands are rethinking productivity in the age of AI

For most marketers, the answer will vary. On a good day, agency work is creative, innovative, and boundary-pushing. On a bad day, it’s chaotic, stressful, even downright painful.

Discussing these challenges in a recent webinar with The Drum, in partnership with Slack, Atomic’s chief executive officer Stephen Quinn, described it like “air traffic control”, only more complicated. Every day campaigns are taking off, changing direction, going one way and then another.

Every brand and every agency wants to guide those campaigns and projects through a smooth take off and land them cleanly at the right destination. At a time when marketing budgets have dropped 15% in just one year, maximizing the good days is business-critical for agencies – it can make the difference between winning new briefs and losing essential clients.

While this is easier said than done, progress has been made. Tools have emerged to make the lives of agencies and the brands they work with simpler and more agile.

Communication and collaboration platforms have been central to this, connecting global teams made up of agencies and in-house experts, in real-time, across time zones or hybrid offices. Meanwhile, integrating other apps – like creative tools for designers or customer relationship management platforms for sales – has meant seamless cross-functional work.

Today we’re on the cusp of taking this a step further, with AI emerging as the next essential for agencies and their brand partners everywhere. Marketers are ready to embrace it – with most believing generative AI will transform their role and save them time.

Time is of the essence

There’s always a deadline looming, a product launch approaching, or a quarter closing. More time means more space to do what we love: finding new and creative ways of making our brands standout.

First let’s be honest about why we are so time poor. Today our time isn’t spent as well as it could be. We invest far too much into areas that don’t drive value for us, our agencies, or our brands.

That might be repetitive administrative work like processing invoices, trying to catch up on a sea of emails after a holiday, or chasing up an approval. It’s here that AI can bring some order to the chaos.

I’ve seen this impact first hand. Recently, I coordinated Salesforce World Tour London, a huge technology conference involving thousands of different moving parts. For me, oversight was crucial. At the same time, it would have been impossible to keep up with every action taken across every team and agency involved. Enter AI.

Using Slack’s recap and thread summary tools – built on AI – I received a daily update that recapped key insights, essential decisions, and next steps across the entire project.

It meant I knew exactly what was happening without having to dig into all the communication that took place. Likewise, I didn’t need to ask an agency to lose their own precious time pulling together a recap for me. They could focus on delivering, and I never had to pump the brakes to ask for a status update.

Across this one project, Slack AI estimated it saved me 373 minutes in reading time by providing these summaries. That’s over six hours of my time which went back into delivering an incredible event. And that’s just me. Scale those time savings across all the teams and agencies involved and you see just how transformative AI can be for marketers.

Keeping it human

Clearly, AI has a role to play in enabling marketers to do more. Equally, we need to be thoughtful about that role. Sam Pepper, group creative director at Wasserman described AI as “the enemy of the mundane”. That’s because it’s those repetitive, unenjoyable tasks that AI is suited to. In contrast, it’s not here to replace creativity.

Creativity is a human quality – it’s an area we can partner with AI, but if we simply try to offload it fully, we’ll enter the age of mediocrity for campaigns. Creativity relies on another human quality – making mistakes. We shouldn’t see AI as a way to cut creative corners, deliver an instant hyper-polished campaign for us, or even remove all the messiness of marketing.

It’s in brainstorms full of good (and bad) ideas, working together on reviews or edits, in the push and pull of different opinions, that great creative work is born between brands and agencies. Let’s focus on using AI to give us more time for that journey to creative success.

Jumping into the AI era

Marketers are used to embracing change, from the rise of television last century to the internet and social media in this one. However, when it comes to AI many brands and agencies are unsure how to start.

My advice is to jump in. Identify a few use cases and start experimenting. It doesn’t have to be a big shift – many tools, including the AI recap feature I use in Slack, require zero setup.

At the same time, think about the data AI can draw on. Having a central command center like Slack that brings everything, from your tools to your people, together, is essential for giving AI the insights it needs to deliver real value.

There will always be intensity between agencies and brands but with the help of AI we can transform that intensity into value. It can cut administrative tasks and busy diaries, and enable us to refocus our time. And it can tip the balance away from those bad days of stress and chaos, and toward the good ones of creative brilliance.

Ready for smarter marketing? Get started with Slack today.