Optimizely research has found that 74% of UK marketers believe the industry is stuck in “survival mode”, with short term requests, admin, and inefficient workflows crowding out creativity and long term planning.
The findings come from The Marketer’s Survival Guide, based on a survey of 100 UK marketers. Nearly two-thirds of respondents, 64%, said they spend most of their time reacting to short term requests rather than planning ahead, while 72% said they personally spend too much time in survival mode.
The research suggests the pressure is not a lack of ambition or ideas, but a lack of time and operating capacity. More than half of marketers, 54%, said they move from campaign to campaign without enough time to properly evaluate performance. A further 51% said they feel stuck in a cycle of constant execution without a comprehensive strategy.
Administrative work is adding to the strain. Almost six in 10 respondents, 59%, said the amount of admin they deal with has increased over the past three years, while 31% said it had increased dramatically.
Tara Corey, senior vice-president of marketing at Optimizely, said: “Operating in survival mode might get a campaign over the line, but it’s not how great marketing gets made. What this research shows is that the ambition is still there, and so is the creativity. But too often, teams are stuck in ways of working that leave very little room for either. Businesses need to build the conditions for their marketing teams to thrive, not just survive.”
Marketers are also looking for structural solutions. Optimizely found that 85% said a unified platform for content, personalisation and experimentation would dramatically improve productivity. Another 43% identified better integration of AI with marketing tools as the biggest opportunity for improved efficiency and optimisation.
Some organisations are already investing. Nearly half of marketers, 46%, said their organisation had invested in all in one marketing and workflow platforms in the past year, while 44% said more automation had been introduced to reduce manual work.
The research lands in a marketing environment shaped by both budget resilience and execution pressure. Marketing budgets have continued to rise in parts of the market despite economic strain, as set out in marketing budgets rise despite economic strain, with spend still flowing into channels that offer engagement and measurable results. Higher spend, however, does not automatically mean marketers have more capacity.
The operational burden on marketing teams has expanded. Teams are producing more content for more channels, managing more data, handling more compliance checks, localising material faster, and responding to sales, product, customer, and leadership requests. Digital channels have increased the volume of activity while also raising expectations for measurement and optimisation.
AI has been presented as one answer to that pressure, but the findings suggest its benefits are not yet being fully realised. AI can accelerate drafting, segmentation, testing, asset generation, and reporting. It can also create review work where outputs need checking for accuracy, brand consistency, legal risk, and performance quality.
That tension has appeared in other marketing research. In advertisers split on GenAI impact, usage was rising faster than confidence in consistent results. The Optimizely findings point to the same issue from inside the marketing function: tools alone do not fix fragmented workflows.
The emphasis on unified platforms shows that marketers are not only seeking automation. They want fewer handoffs, clearer campaign visibility, better content management, faster experimentation, and closer links between personalisation and performance data. In many organisations, the problem is the number of systems and processes sitting between strategy and execution.
The inability to evaluate campaigns properly is particularly serious. If teams move immediately from one campaign to the next, lessons are lost. Marketing becomes a production function rather than a growth discipline. That weakens budget allocation, creative quality, customer understanding, and boardroom credibility.
The survey also carries a leadership message. Marketing performance depends on how work is requested, prioritised, briefed, reviewed, and measured across the business. If every department treats marketing as an always on response unit, strategy will be crowded out even where budgets rise.
Better integration of AI with marketing tools may reduce some manual pressure, but it will not remove the need for operating discipline. Teams need clearer priorities, fewer ad hoc requests, stronger briefing processes, and time to assess what has worked. Without that, technology can simply accelerate the cycle of reactive execution.
Optimizely’s research frames marketing pressure as an operating model issue rather than a motivation problem. Marketers still report ambition and creativity, but the structures around them are not consistently giving those qualities room to shape growth.
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