• by Laurie Sullivan , Yesterday

New research from DoubleVerify shows agencies spend 26% of their time manually optimizing client campaigns. It averages out to about 10 hours per week for every employee worldwide.

The company estimates these tasks cost agencies more than $17,000 per team member each year in lost productivity, mostly allocated to repetitive tasks in North America.

The report — titled 2025 Global Insights: AI, Automation and the Future of Digital Advertising — pulls from campaign analytics and a global survey of 1,970 executives in marketing and advertising. The data explores how artificial intelligence (AI) is changing digital advertising.

The growing operational burden placed on marketers, particularly in programmatic media buying, is a major theme of the report.

Campaign managers spend too much time per week on manual tasks, according to the report, which provides examples such as tweaking bid modifiers, reallocating budgets and adjusting performance thresholds.

AI adoption across campaign activation, bidding, summarizing media briefs and creative optimization continues to rise.

Some 91% of marketers say they use or plan to use third-party AI or automated bidding tools outside of their demand-side platforms (DSPs) to support campaign performance and streamline operations.

Campaign activation, for example, has experienced a 32% year-over-year increase.

Bidding and mid-flight optimization grew by 12% YoY, reflecting the increased complexity of media performance, which DoubleVerify suggests AI can manage more effectively than humans can.

Summarizing media briefs rose by 11%, while dynamic creative optimization was up by 8%.

Manual campaign optimization takes up about 26% of a marketer’s time -- an average of 10 hours per week per employee globally.

Marketers often multitask campaign key performance indicators (KPIs), but limited time and resources mean they must prioritize one goal, frequently at the cost of secondary objectives, according to the report.

As marketers continue to spend on upper-funnel and brand-building tactics, targeting precision and inventory quality are becoming non-negotiable.

The top five challenges with programmatic campaign optimization extend across a number of areas. For example, 44% cited reaching target audience segments, while 38% cited staying on budget, 37% cited ability to implement optimizations quick and efficiently, 35% cited meeting KPIs, and 34% cited time spent manually working on optimization campaigns.