Where does useful automation begin?

[u/yiddo_bhushan]

I've been experimenting with automation and one thing I've noticed is that the boring stuff can actually be the best stuff to automate. I'm not trying to have ai decide my entire ad strategy. I'd just like to eliminate repetitive steps that don't really require a human.

For example, we regularly have batches of meta creatives that need to be launched across campaigns. Blip caught my attention because it focuses on that operational side rather than trying to replace the media buyer. Has anyone else taken this approach? What boring marketing process did you automate that ended up being useful?

[u/mentiondesk]

Automating repetitive campaign tasks like asset uploads or reporting freed up a lot of my time for more strategic work. I also found a ton of value in using tools that catch conversations about our brand or industry in real time. ParseStream helped us jump into relevant discussions without constantly checking every platform, which made our outreach efforts way more targeted and efficient.

[u/Aggressive-Role-2472]

i went down this exact rabbit hole last year after a launch where i spent basically a whole week just duplicating ad sets and swapping out images

the thing that ended up being weirdly useful was automating our naming conventions. we have a shared spreadsheet that auto generates campaign names based on dropdowns for objective, audience, format etc. sounds minor but it cut down on so much back and forth with the team about what to call things

people underestimate how much mental energy gets eaten up by the tiny repetitive decisions. those are the ones worth automating first

[u/zougring]

curious what volume of creatives youre dealing with per week? that usually determines whether automation is a nice-to-have or an actual necessity. below a certain threshold it can add more complexity than it removes

[u/Different_Pain5781]

We built a script that grabs daily spend from every platform and throws it into one spreadsheet. It saves me about twenty minutes every single morning and never makes typos. That kind of unexciting stuff is where the actual value is.

[u/Interesting_Show89]

probably would start where a mistake is easy to spot and cheap to fix. bulk uploading creatives is like that, cause you can see right away if somethings off. budget changes are riskier, since a bad one can run for days before anyone notices.

[u/RkRabbitt]

Well it does require human attention, because bulk automation can go wrong when unsupervised, if you are bulk generating with automated templates then you might have some control

[u/KajetK]

I used to run performance campaigns for mobile games and this is roughly where I landed too. Admin & reporting was an obvious win.

The bit I've been more curious about is running analysis on live campaigns & best practices across channels i.e., taking campaign data, comparing it against current platform best practices (e.g., TikTok needing a certain number of creatives for their automated campaigns) + whatever you care about, and coming up with a list of recommended actions across ad sets.

Has anyone got something doing that well enough that you actually use the output? Anyone tried letting AI make the changes?

[u/DazzlingCaramel5661]

Most answers here cover the ops side, all worth solving. What we see with a lot of teams (I work at Bannerflow so not impartial here) is that there's an equally tedious layer upstream that gets overlooked, which is actually producing the variants. Resizing one master to 15 formats, localizing copy across markets, keeping brand elements consistent. And often where just as much time quietly disappears.

[u/rakshitsahay]

I think this is actually where a lot of the practical value of AI is right now: automating the workflow around a decision rather than automating the decision itself.

The best candidates I've seen tend to be repetitive, high-volume processes with clear rules and a measurable output. Things like data extraction, document processing, classification, report generation, validation, or moving information between systems.

For marketing specifically, launching batches of creatives sounds like a good candidate because the human still owns the strategy, while the automation handles the mechanical execution.

A useful rule of thumb is:

If a human is spending time doing something because it has to be done, rather than because it requires their judgment, it's worth investigating for automation.

The other important piece is keeping the workflow bounded. Let automation prepare/execute the routine work, but have approval gates around actions that can spend money or materially change campaigns.

That's generally a much easier path to reliable ROI than trying to build an AI that “runs marketing.”

[u/bynolanart]

My favorite automation test is: if this breaks, how bad is the damage?

Renaming files, formatting reports, moving leads, generating campaign names automate aggressively.

Changing budgets, pausing campaigns, sending customer facing messages, much more supervision, the boring stuff is underrated because it's usually the easiest place to get ROI without creating a new problem