Under the cosh marketers crave return of creativity

Marketers’ obsession with new technology might grate with their agencies but ultimately it will allow them to get their jobs back, with the bulk of their time currently being spent tracking performance, creating competitive analyses and producing audience insights.

According to a study conducted by media agency PHD and WARC, which quizzed 1,721 global senior brand marketers, the amount of time marketers spend on reporting tasks has increased by nearly three-fifths (57%) over the past decade.

Globally, more than nine in ten (88%) marketers say they spend most of their time on reporting tasks, and more time on planning (83%) and analyzing investments (74%).

In fact, marketers estimate they spend just 18% of their time – the equivalent of less than one day a week – carrying out their core duties of thinking creatively and coming up with new ideas.

Executing campaigns dropped from the fourth to the fifth most regularly carried out task over the past year, as well as producing campaigns, which dropped from the third to the fourth most frequent task.

However, as Forrester recently predicted, the rise of artificial intelligence and intelligent automation will have a major impact on marketers, as well as agencies.

For instance, data management platforms and agency audience activation technologies are already producing audience insights in a fraction of the time it takes to manually gather, process, analyse, and report qualitative and quantitative research. Insights that once took days and weeks are now revealed in hours.

Some 91% of marketers surveyed by WARC and PHD predict that in ten years, creativity will once again dominate the role. Respondents also agree that analytics will take up 16% more of their time over the next decade.

PHD worldwide strategy and planning director Mark Holden said marketers will be able to focus on more creative tasks as the industry builds out its reporting capability and infrastructure. He added: “When you look towards the future, [time spent on] reporting starts to drop because people can turn their minds back to how to grow brands with creativity.”

Given the new landscape, Holden believes agencies should already have data and analytics infrastructure, as well as talent with analytics skills in place to keep up. He concluded: “We must apply the same precision mindset that we had applied to technology to talent. It’s not a cost to be reduced, but as an investment for growth.”