A recent productivity research document from Adobe has claimed that US full-time workers estimate losing 91 business days a year to low-impact tasks, and that marketers spent close to three hours a day on operational busywork.
In large marketing teams, campaigns pass through different tools for different parts of the overall workflow: planning, content, media, legal, analytics, sales, and customer teams. Some tools will cover two or more of these functions, but few tools cover all the bases. Regardless, the bottlenecks to productivity come from unclear priorities, interruptions, context switching, and each platform’s particular idiosyncrasies.
A campaign brief might sit in a document, creative review in a proofing tool, channel planning in a spreadsheet, budget approvals in email and deadlines in a project board. The gaps turn routine coordination into labour.
Why tool choice matters
The market now contains several work management platforms that may suit individual marketing teams, but the correct starting point is process mapping. A team should first identify where time is being lost, with common problems emanating from manual intake, repeated status meetings (a human problem), unclear ownership of responsibility, version control, late approval, and reporting.
The company states Adobe Workfront is a credible option to surmount the issue as it’s designed around enterprise-scale work management. It is strongest where marketing operations need governance, capacity planning, and a system of record. Workfront, however, may be too much platform for smaller teams that mainly need task tracking.
Asana’s solutions could suit marketing teams needing cross-functional work tracking, and its newer AI features are aimed at creating summaries, helping with workflow and agentic automation. Monday.com may suit teams that want to visualise their workflows on a virtual board, and the platform offers integrations between sales, marketing, and other business operations. Its two-way synchronisation and automation across platforms can help teams that need a more adaptable operating layer, especially where marketing work may vary from campaign to campaign. It’s worth noting, conversely, that flexible systems can become untidy if the organisation does not define its workflows outside of the platform: normalising naming conventions, ownership and responsibilities, and reporting standards.
Wrike may be suitable where creative proofing, approvals, and campaign production are the main friction points. Its emphasis on templates, automation, approvals, dashboards, and Adobe Creative Cloud work means it may fit with teams invested in the Adobe stack – creative services teams, in-house studios, and agencies reliant on review loops.
Gartner’s 2026 marketing work management category lists platforms Smartsheet and Jira among reviewed options. Smartsheet fits teams that work with spreadsheet planning but need dashboards and automation. Jira is typically a fit for teams tied to engineering or agile release cycles, so it can feel misaligned for creative teams if it’s left configured to suit software delivery workflows.
Automation should begin with low-risk work
AI and automation are often presented as the answer to marketing overload, but the safer interpretation is narrower. The best early use cases of AI are in repetitive, rule-based processes such as deadline reminders, status updates, approval notifications, and reporting.
A practical audit should examine the current stack and record where work changes hands. Leaders should ask which tasks are repeated every week, and every hour, which updates are commonly requested in face-to-face meetings, where and why approvals stall, and which reports require manual assembly. The aim should be to remove administrative steps before adding more software for the sake of it.
Tool consolidation (using platforms that cover off many workflow steps) can help, but only where they reduce friction overall: fewer vendors is not the same as a better overall workflow. Typically, individual platforms each have the effect of producing workarounds, so a smaller number of connected tools may work well despite this as long as responsibilities are clearly laid out (and integrations between the different platforms are reliable).
Marketing productivity will improve when teams treat operations as part of the work. A better system will not remove the pressure of campaign deadlines or commercial targets, but it can reduce the time lost to avoidable make-work. The strongest case for platforms such as Workfront, Asana, monday.com, Wrike or Smartsheet is not that they make marketers more creative, but that — when well-configured — they can give marketers more time to do the work they were actually hired for.
Find out more about the Digital Marketing World Forum series and register here.