Key Takeaways
- A Knak survey found that 85% of teams missed at least one campaign launch date last year, with delays rooted in production bottlenecks rather than strategy or creative work.
- AI has reached the first-draft stage for most teams, but 88% say the output still needs moderate to substantial human editing, leaving the production layer between idea and launch largely unsolved.
A new survey of more than 300 enterprise marketing leaders finds ideas are not an issue for campaign launch dates not meeting deadlines, it’s the bottlenecks that occur in in the execution.
The Marketing Production in the Age of AI from Knak details the issues is not strategy or creative missteps but instead everything that happens after the idea is approved: the handoffs, revisions and rebuilds required to turn finished copy into a live email.
For the companies surveyed on what it takes to send one email, 60% involve four or more people, 54% juggle three to five separate tools, and 69% need two to three rounds of revisions— roughly $300 in internal labor before it even goes out. For half of these teams, approvals still run through email and Slack threads.
Survey Finds Campaign Delays Stem From Production Bottlenecks
This is the layer Knak calls marketing production and the report finds it’s quietly consuming enterprise teams, even the ones trusted to run marketing for Google, Amazon, Uber, Meta and OpenAI.
“It’s not a talent problem or a creativity problem. It’s the production layer— the gap between a good idea and a launched campaign,” said Jennifer Delevante, CMO at Knak in a statement. “Until that gets fixed, teams will keep buying tools that get them to a draft and leave them stuck before launch.”
Knak Says the Real Problem Starts After the Draft Is Done
Delevante noted that marketers were told artificial intelligence (AI) “would hand them back time for strategy. Our data says it hasn’t happened yet.” While 70% of teams have deployed it in production, 88% say the output still needs moderate to substantial human editing before use. AI is getting teams to a first draft and not to launch.
The report found deadlines being missed in not contained to just one team or department as 85% of marketing teams have missed at least one planned campaign launch date in the past 12 months due to workflow constraints, and 1 in 10 miss launches more than five times per year. The top causes are operational, not creative: getting approvals and sign-off (47%), design and creative production (38%) and coordinating across teams (36%). Other key findings from the report include:
- One email is a production project: 60% of teams involve at least four people in producing a single email, and 69% say emails require two to three rounds of revision before launch, totaling over $300 in internal labor costs per send, based on BLS pay data. Meanwhile, 54% use three to five separate tools to produce a single email and 51% still rely on email, Slack or Teams threads as their primary workflow and approval mechanism.
- AI got in the door, but not to the finish line: AI use is concentrated on creative inputs, including first-draft copy generation (64%) and image generation (56%), while only 25% use it to build or code emails and landing pages, where the production burden is heaviest.
- Rising email investment raises the stakes: 88% of teams produce campaign assets for email, nearly 50% above the next channel (paid social, at 60%), and 52% plan to add or significantly increase email spend in the next 12 months.
The full report, which can be access by clicking here, details where advanced AI adopters are pulling ahead, how team structure and tech stack decisions affect production speed and what separates organizations that consistently launch on time from those that don’t.
