Almost half of UK marketers say low-value administration consumes at least a quarter of their working week, highlighting the operational burden created by fragmented processes, internal approvals, and expanding technology stacks.
Research from Optimizely found that 45% of marketers spend at least a quarter of their time on administrative work, while 14% said those tasks occupy more than half of the working week.
The underlying survey was first published by Optimizely on 23 July and questioned 100 UK marketers alongside 1,000 UK consumers. A supplied release dated 18 August has subsequently highlighted the administrative and workflow findings.
The results indicate that the problem extends across teams rather than being confined to individual routine tasks. Two-thirds of marketers — 66% — said managing multiple tools and platforms creates unnecessary work, while 59% reported that administration in their role had increased over the previous three years.
Reporting was the most frequently cited area of growing administrative demand, identified by 67%. Meeting volumes followed at 66%, while 64% pointed to more time being spent demonstrating marketing’s value and 61% to greater effort justifying budgets and expenditure.
Approval processes are becoming more complex as well, with 57% reporting an increase.
The operational impact can reach the campaigns customers eventually see. Sixty per cent of marketers said administrative and process constraints had forced them to scale back or simplify work, while the same proportion said they had launched campaigns without enough time or data to optimise them properly.
More than half reported missing timely opportunities around major events because of internal bottlenecks, and 54% said a major seasonal campaign had launched late because of poor processes and administrative overload.
Tara Corey, senior vice-president of marketing at Optimizely, said: “Most marketers didn’t get into the profession to spend their days chasing approvals or jumping between platforms.”
The findings add a process-management dimension to the debate around marketing productivity. Creative output is normally discussed through talent, budgets, agencies, technology, and media channels, but coordination can determine how much capacity remains for strategy and experimentation.
Marketing departments have accumulated specialist platforms for content, analytics, experimentation, customer data, advertising, social media, project management, personalisation, and generative AI. Each may solve a particular problem while creating extra work where systems do not exchange data or approvals smoothly.
AI adoption is consequently appearing alongside calls for greater integration rather than simply more software. Optimizely found that 41% of marketers had invested in AI assistants during the previous 12 months and 38% planned to invest over the following year.
Training is receiving similar attention. Forty-two per cent reported investment intended to improve AI outputs, while 44% planned additional spending. Better integration between AI and existing marketing systems was identified as the leading opportunity to improve efficiency.
The responses also show that AI can introduce work as well as remove it. Seventy per cent said its use had created new complexity during major campaigns, and 20% said current adoption had increased their workload. By contrast, 67% said AI had reduced workload overall.
Different levels of implementation can explain part of that apparent contradiction. Automation may remove repetitive drafting or analysis while adding requirements around checking, prompting, data integration, governance, and approvals.
Consumer responses provide another constraint. Fifty-nine per cent of consumers surveyed said the quality of marketing content had declined in recent years, while 62% said they trusted marketing content less since brands began using AI.
Seventy-two per cent said they were more likely to engage with content that felt human rather than automated. Those responses do not demonstrate that administrative workload or AI caused lower content quality, but they show the expectations marketing teams are trying to meet while processes become more complex.
The marketer sample is relatively small at 100 respondents, so individual percentages should not be treated as precise measures of the entire UK profession. The findings are self-reported and do not prove that inefficient workflows directly caused weaker campaign results.
They nevertheless identify a consistent operating problem: marketing teams are investing in more automation while reporting substantial time lost to approvals, reporting, coordination, and disconnected systems.
Productivity gains from the next generation of marketing technology will depend on whether new systems remove existing work rather than adding another layer. Where AI is integrated into a coherent workflow, it can reduce repetitive activity; where it sits above fragmented systems, the administrative burden can simply change form.
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