Guest Post – Advertising Ops Is Marketing’s Biggest AI Challenge

If you want to understand where advertising is headed, don’t just read another article or sit through another panel about AI. Look at what’s already happening inside your agency and brand teams today.

XR recently partnered with MX8 Labs to survey more than 400 marketers across brands, full-service agencies, production companies, media agencies and creative boutiques for our inaugural State of Ad Ops report. The findings paint a clear picture. Advertising production is accelerating fast as more content is needed to feed a growing number of channels, and brand and agency teams are struggling to keep up:

• More than 80% of marketers are producing more ad content than a year ago, while 70% of them are doing so with the same or fewer resources.
• 7 out of 10 marketers on both the brand and agency side regularly exceed their production budgets.
• Nearly half (48%) of full-service agencies say they often or very often have to scale back campaign scope.

Most of the conversation today is about how AI will help marketers create faster: generating images, editing video, producing variations, personalizing campaigns, automating work that used to take days. All true.

But our research suggests that’s only half the story. Creating more content doesn’t automatically make marketing more efficient. Between a creative idea becoming an ad and that ad appearing on someone’s screen are hundreds of operational steps. Someone still has to pay for it, approve it, make versions, manage rights, deliver it and measure performance.

That’s where AI becomes a double-edged sword. Every new asset needs to be budgeted, approved, tracked, delivered and measured, and our research shows agency and brand teams are already under pressure:

• 46% say internal budget approvals are major causes of delayed campaign launches.
• A staggering 30% to 40% of finished creative never gets used, most often because campaign direction changes after production is complete.
• Client and legal approvals account for 22% of unused creative.

Think about that. We as an industry have become incredibly good at making great advertising. We’re just not very good at managing everything that happens before or after it’s made, and AI has the potential to make those challenges even worse.

If campaigns grow from hundreds of assets to hundreds of thousands, marketers won’t just have more creative to produce. They’ll have exponentially more approvals, budgets, talent rights, versions, deliveries and compliance checks to manage. As AI scales content creation, operations become just as important as the creative itself.

That’s why we think ad operations must move from the back office to the boardroom, from CMO’s afterthought to the foundation of their marketing strategy.

The teams that benefit most from AI won’t necessarily be the ones creating the most content. They’ll be the ones that know exactly what’s being made, what it’s costing, who approved it, where it’s running and what value it’s delivering.

For years, marketers have invested billions measuring and optimizing media performance. It’s time to bring that same focus upstream to the creative supply chain.

These insights are drawn from XR’s State of Ad Ops report, an industry-wide study examining the pain points shaping modern advertising production.

Graham McKenna is CMO of Extreme Reach (XR), which recently launched XR ONE, the first advertising operations platform that helps brands and agencies manage how ads are produced, paid for and delivered across every media platform. Before joining XR, he led product marketing at Nielsen following its acquisition of Gracenote, where he served as head of marketing for nearly a decade.