According to a recent survey from the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) and global media advisors MediaSense, 54% of agencies feel that the digital advertising agency is facing its “worst-ever crisis” when it comes to talent. Across the entire advertising industry, 67% of respondents cite talent scarcity as a major blocker to growth.
There’s not an easy solution for these staffing challenges. Agencies are competing for high-quality talent in a shrinking candidate pool (three in four advertisers say that a skills shortage is a primary driver of hiring challenges). At the same time, agencies are trying to keep their existing staff from burning out while simultaneously trying to increase staff-to-client workloads to improve profitability margins.
How can agencies grow if they are continuously burdened by staffing issues?
Technology can alleviate the tasks that no one wants to do, making it a powerful tool for both hiring initiatives and current employees. By automating mundane tasks, agencies can enhance their appeal to job seekers while empowering current employees to focus on strategic, high-value activities.
The right tools, like automation and AI, can even help address the growing skills gap by completing complex workflows at scale or computing data analyses that would otherwise require specialized skill sets.
Keep reading to learn three tech-enabled strategies that can help you find and retain quality AdOps talent in 2025.
Differentiate your agency with technology that prioritizes people
In today’s remote-dominated world, agencies can no longer lean on a fun workplace atmosphere with cold brew kegs and ping pong tables. Technology is the new differentiator for attracting quality applicants because it can make a job more enticing by giving team members more time to do the work they enjoy doing.
Take automation, for example. Automating tedious, repetitive tasks means employees have more time for strategic work or strengthening client relationships. Wouldn’t we all want to spend more time solving intriguing problems or making progress on goals instead of manually updating spreadsheets?
Adopting automated advertising solutions shows that you value your employees for their creative and critical thinking skills, not the speed at which they can copy and paste things from one place to another. Job applicants, especially those with valuable experience in digital advertising, are hungry for positions that leverage their unique skill sets.
With the right tech tools, you can make team changes that truly enable team members to do the work they enjoy. Take a look at this short case study to see how one ad agency adopted automation and transitioned 25% of their work week to strategic work and optimations.
Case study: restructuring workloads for less monotonous work
Jared Drahonovsky, Group Media Manager at the Johnson Group digital marketing agency, found that most of his team’s time was consumed by repetitive, time-intensive processes. Managing more than 1,000 campaigns across Google and Meta meant the team was sinking most of its time into tactical work. This made it harder for them to focus on higher-value strategic work.
Drahonovsky worked to bring in automation tools. “to free up time so that we could do things that we deem more important.” Automation took over many of the repetitive daily tasks, like pacing and campaign QA, so that Drahonovsky’s team could spend more time working directly with customer contacts, strategic optimizations, and testing new ideas.
“Automation allowed us to open up a lot of doors,” added Drahonovsky. “We wanted to spend less time on the day-to-day management and spend more time on strategy and client communication. Fluency helped us accomplish that.”
The team has also gained more time for professional development and growth. These changes lay the foundation for more meaningful work and, in turn, a more fulfilling environment for the team.
“Fluency handles a lot of the day-to-day tasks, which has allowed me to train up the team and get them to where they need to be,” said Drahonovsky. “It has also allowed me to advance and work on other accounts and other initiatives.”
While not explicitly stated, shifting the team’s focus to more impactful tasks and growth opportunities strongly suggests an uplifted and more motivated workplace culture.
Investing in automation and AI tools also shows your agency’s commitment to future-proofing the organization. You’re demonstrating that you want to continue providing your employees with cutting-edge solutions that enhance their skills and promote professional growth.
Retain your top performers using tech that reduces burnout
Agencies have felt the impact of employee attrition for years, and the outlook still isn’t great. According to Forbes, employee turnover at big agencies and their holding companies may reach “a whopping 35% or 40%.”
Keeping your current staff can feel as difficult as hiring new employees. The reality is that staff turnover is a multi-faceted problem without a single, simple solution. Still, it’s worth considering this ideology: when employees do work that they love, they become more invested in the company and are less likely to leave.
Sounds simple in theory, right? But it’s proven tough to achieve using the same tools, methods, and procedures that you’ve used for years. None of the things you’ve implemented in the past gave your team more capacity or time to do the work they like doing.
That’s because traditional tools can’t be used to address the onslaught of complex, convoluted challenges facing ad teams today. If you’re going to solve today’s challenges, you need technological solutions designed for today’s (and tomorrow’s) challenges.
One way to give employees the capacity for more enjoyable work is by automating low-value tasks. These are the parts of their job that have to get done and often take up a lot of time, but they add very little value to the overall goal or metrics they’re trying to hit. Automation can take most of these energy-sucking tasks off your employees’ plates, giving them instant capacity to do more impactful work.
Take a look at how one automotive agency has used automation in multiple ways so their employees have more time for high-value work.
Case study: automated data-powered dashboards
Ben Gilbert, Senior Director of Advertising Innovation at Dealer.com, a Cox Automotive company, saw automation as a way to get his team out of the weeds so they could do more meaningful work.
The team adopted automation-powered “coffee cup dashboards” that sync data from every publisher, channel, account, and campaign into one view. This enables team members to address the most pressing issues quickly, first thing in the morning—before they finish their coffee.
“Every morning when an Ad Strat logs into their Fluency account, all the information is brought to them and shows what needs to be worked on that day,” said Gilbert. “No longer do they have to hunt for something that's broken…The dashboard tells them what needs attention or needs to be fixed in the first moment of the day.”
Instead of cutting, pasting, and fixing things, Gilbert says everyone can work on “more strategic things or have more client conversations, which a lot of our reps just love doing.”
Case study: one-click report generation saves employees “thousands of hours”
Gilbert’s team also uses technology to generate client performance reports “that have account-specific information, with trends and graphs, avatars, and AI-analyzed information” in just one click.
“It’s literally one click compared to hours of manual work cutting and pasting screenshots from Excel sheets,” said Gilbert. “We always used to say it takes a small team just to put together decks. That's not a good use of our investment on the ops side or for a non-revenue generating team.”
Gilbert said that using automation and AI to quickly create personalized client performance reports has saved his team “thousands of hours”—hours they put right back into high-value work.
Automation enables your team to do more strategic work that’s more valuable to the company and more engaging for employees. Automating low-value tasks makes the best use of your top-performing team members while giving them the capacity to do more of the work they like to do. In short, it’s a win-win for you and your team.
Mitigate the impact of turnover by capturing and automating SME knowledge
No matter how effective your agency's retention strategies are, employee turnover is inevitable. However, the right technology tools can significantly mitigate the impact of losing employees and their intrinsic knowledge.
For example, your team likely has standardized playbooks for how to build specific campaigns, make performance optimizations based on criteria, or perform a series of steps when certain scenarios arise.
(Let’s also consider that team members with highly specialized skill sets, platform expertise, or longevity at your organization often maintain these playbooks. Is updating user manuals really the best use of their time?)
Now, imagine if digital tools could automatically perform the nuanced steps and procedures documented in these playbooks. Whenever the right conditions emerge for any account across your entire portfolio, technology can replicate the actions of your subject matter experts in a fraction of the time.
That’s the power of automation.
Automation also alleviates many of the challenges associated with maintaining these playbooks. For example, Fluency integrates directly with publishers so your team doesn’t need to manually update docs or Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) every time a change is made. Instead, the system accounts for any UI changes or new steps automatically. This allows your team to focus on the right strategic moves instead of updating massive procedural documents every time a platform update comes through.
Lastly, automation enables a seamless knowledge transfer from your subject matter experts (whether they leave or not) to your greenest employees. Technology can serve as a bridge between your experienced team members and new hires, making it possible to pass on critical information and skills. Using automation in this way minimizes the loss of intrinsic knowledge when team members leave while simultaneously accelerating the onboarding of new employees into the team.
The time to adopt technology as a talent enabler is now
There's apprehension about how AI and advanced technologies will impact the digital advertising industry, both now and in the future. Many people in advertising are worried that these technologies will replace their work.
The reality is that automation can serve as a talent enabler for your agency rather than a threat. Technology can unburden your teams from repetitive, time-consuming tasks that jeopardize meaningful work. Our clients have reported that their employees are doing more of the kind of work they like doing.
Freeing your team of monotonous tasks gives them the ability to think critically, solve intriguing problems, do more creative work, and foster stronger customer relationships. (Technology isn't going to replace this type of work anytime soon.)
Using automation to enhance job roles and streamline processes can help agencies attract high-quality talent and mitigate the impact of turnover as the work landscape continues to evolve. As the digital advertising landscape continues to evolve, those agencies that adopt automation will be best positioned to attract and retain high-quality talent in an ever-changing environment.
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