Digital Ad Agencies Seek to 2x Client Accounts With 0% Additional Headcount, According to New Research from Fluency

Agency AdOps Benchmark Report Reveals 80% of Ad Strategists Manage 3+ Channels Simultaneously–Scaling Growth Will Require Operational Overhauls and Automation

BURLINGTON, VT, UNITED STATES, September 18, 2025 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Fluency, the digital advertising operating system for scaling paid media operations across all major channels has released the findings of its annual Agency AdOps Benchmark Report. The study reveals that digital advertising agencies want to nearly double their portfolios without expanding their teams, but manual campaign inefficiencies are standing in the way of supporting greater client loads. Advertising operations (AdOps) teams surveyed spend an average of one week each month (46 hours per month) making manual campaign changes–like updating budgets, adjusting target audiences and swapping creative assets–for a single client account, consuming valuable time and limiting their ability to grow.

Digital advertising agencies’ ambitions to scale effectively are at odds with the complex, manual workflows and fragmented operations required to do their jobs. This complexity is compounded as they work to deliver multichannel advertising across numerous clients–each of which might have hundreds of ad accounts requiring thousands of targeted ads across locations. Adding to this mix, disconnected systems, abundant data, error-prone manual processes and costly internal tools slow time-to-market and create operational challenges. Ad strategists say these manual tasks are the biggest impediment to their growth, with 69% saying they want to reduce manual workloads and human errors and 56% seeking technology solutions to mitigate risk in budgeting and campaign management–two of their most critical workflows.

Fluency currently powers over $2.5B in annual media spend and 250,000+ monthly campaigns for brands and agencies. The company surveyed more than 75 U.S. independent digital advertising agencies and in-house advertising teams responsible for performance marketing across multiple brands and regions, for its 2025 Agency AdOps Benchmark Report. The report provides a baseline for how teams are currently approaching digital advertising operations, and offers a data-backed look at what’s working–and what’s not.

Among the findings:

- 35% of ad strategists say they struggle to manage campaigns efficiently. Walled gardens like Google and Amazon have unique rules, settings and analytics, while the open web–accessed through DSPs–uses its own ad formats and tracking methods. Navigating these platforms for multiple campaigns simultaneously without AI or automation is next to impossible.
- More than half (58%) of ad strategists use more than one source for audience data, but lack a unified view of performance. The most common data sources, according to respondents, are first-party data from Google or Facebook (90%), custom data sources (34%) and third-party integrations (27%).
- Forty percent (40%) of AdOps teams juggle multiple budgeting tools, making it one of the most fragmented workflows in digital advertising. The most common pacing methods, or how ad budgets are spent over time, are manual processes (55%) and spreadsheets (42%)–both of which are highly error-prone. Budget-related errors can drive costly credits and adjustments, making them a critical roadblock to agency profitability.
- Agencies spend an average of 76 hours to launch new clients, and for one in four digital ad agencies, moving from ad creative to a live digital campaign still takes over a week. Fragmented systems and manual processes for compiling assets and implementing campaigns drive these delays, preventing teams from delivering timely campaigns and limiting agency growth.

“Digital agency growth has been constrained for too long by workflows that don’t scale–teams are trapped in manual processes, spending hours on operational tasks rather than driving strategy and supporting client growth,” said Andy MacLeay, VP of Engagement and Channels, Fluency. “These time-consuming workflows and fragmented operations aren’t going away, but by embracing automation, agencies can deliver campaigns faster, focus on strategy and scale client portfolios—all without adding headcount.”

Founded in 2017, Fluency centralizes all major aspects of digital advertising execution and management in a single platform that allows scaled execution across both walled gardens and the open web. The company’s digital advertising operating system empowers users with AI-powered automation to streamline the most time-consuming campaign execution processes at a scale not unachievable through hiring, outsourcing, or siloed tools or fragmented technologies.

The full report can be viewed here.

About Fluency

Fluency is the only digital advertising operating system engineered for organizations that run complex digital media portfolios. The first solution to combine purpose-built Robotic Process Automation for Advertising with integrated AI, Fluency addresses critical advertising operations challenges by streamlining resource-intensive tasks associated with digital advertising content generation, execution, management, and optimization. The result is an easily scalable system that has helped category leading agencies and brands achieve transformational time savings, operational efficiency, and profitability. Fluency manages over $2.5B in annual ad spend and routinely ranks #1 for performance and client support on G2. For more information, please visit www.fluency.inc

Kieran Powell
Fluency
kieran.powell@channelvmedia.com

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