On paper, offshoring seems like a cost-effective way to scale your advertising business. It’s why many advertisers view offshoring as the only way to grow their bottom line as their company grows. After all, few traditional routes enable you to scale your operations without breaking the bank.
However, offshoring your advertising operations introduces significant risks that jeopardize both performance and client trust. The true price is paid in operational friction. Decentralizing your AdOps leads to costly errors, limits your strategic agility, and creates operational silos that make holistic campaign management impossible at scale.
This article explores the fundamental limitations of human-led AdOps and how you can overcome them for true operational scale (without sacrificing control or accuracy).
The challenges and risks of offshoring your advertising operations
There are three core problems generated when you rely on a manual, outsourced workforce for your advertising operations. Let’s take a look at why scaling operations by simply adding more hands on deck is a well-intentioned, but fundamentally flawed, practice.
1. More hands on keyboards means more costly mistakes
Offshored labor may be cheaper on paper, but it can cost you far more in operational weight. Yes, you might hit more launch deadlines by assigning these tasks to offshored teams, but at what cost?
Offshoring your operations to more people simply means you’re increasing the number of people executing manual AdOps tasks. Manual tasks come with big risks. We’ve all seen how small missteps (like a misplaced decimal in a budget or copy-pasting text in the wrong place) can drive up wasted ad spend or poor performance.
Every manual data entry, adjustment, and report is another chance for something to go wrong. If you’re an agency, more errors mean issuing more client credits. If you’re in-house, you waste precious time scrambling to recoup lost ground.
More errors also mean more time spent on redundant rework. It forces your most talented employees to be brand babysitters. Rather than strategizing, they’re heavily QAing work from outside teams or stuck in lengthy back-and-forth approval processes.
2. Manual, human-led task execution has physical limits
Offshoring means managing different team members (often in different time zones) who are more likely to execute tasks with slight variations. But executing consistent, on-brand strategies is extremely difficult when more people are involved. Even with lengthy process playbook docs, individual team members will likely do things their own way.
Plus, some advertising strategies are impossible to execute manually, no matter how big your team is. Consider a complex strategy based on real-time triggers, like a display campaign that dynamically swaps out copy and images based on local weather conditions. Managing this advertising strategy would require a team member to monitor regional forecasts and make updates 24/7.
Now, multiply this effort by hundreds or thousands of local markets. You would need a massive team working around the clock just to check forecasts and manually update campaigns.
Offshoring (or any form of massive hiring, for that matter) wouldn't help you pull off a complex real-time strategy like this. The challenge isn't that you don't have enough people to do it; it’s the physical limitations of a purely human workforce. Even if you hire a thousand employees (eek!), they still can't monitor thousands of things simultaneously around the clock.
3. Siloed operations weaken cross-channel efficiencies and scalability
One of the most underestimated byproducts of offshoring is that it reinforces operational silos instead of breaking them down.
Typically, companies will send AdOps workflows (e.g., campaign execution, budgeting, and reporting) out to different teams or vendors that specialize in specific channels or client types. As a result, campaigns are divided by specialization, region, or platform.
For example, paid search might be managed by one offshore team, while a different team manages social or programmatic. Each of these teams operates with its own tools, processes, and data sources, fragmenting valuable insights and collaboration opportunities.
The reality is that channel-specific operations make it nearly impossible to manage holistic multichannel campaigns. When optimizations are made in channel silos, you can’t get a clear understanding of how each tweak impacts the overall strategy or transfer valuable findings from one channel to another (e.g., from Google Ads to Bing Ads).
Viewing and acting upon performance data isn’t the only challenge, though. It also makes reporting burdensome and time-consuming because data gets trapped within isolated platforms or spreadsheets. Teams must spend hours gathering data from different places, normalizing formats, and stitching together client reports every month.
How does automation mitigate or eliminate the risk of AdOps offshoring?
A Digital Advertising Operating System (DAOS) powered by AI and automation offers a direct solution to the problems associated with offshored operations. It shifts the focus from managing labor to using a centralized, automated system to orchestrate your AdOps with a consistency, speed, and accuracy that manual workflows can't match.
1. Automated AdOps gives you predictability and precision
AI-powered automation isn't cheaper labor; it's zero-labor execution of your AdOps playbook. This is because automating your advertising operations takes human hands off the keyboard for repetitive task execution.
Turning to a solution like a DAOS (Digital Advertising Operating System) instead of offshoring your AdOps lets you launch and manage multichannel campaigns, budgets, and reports from one centralized system. You can build standardized workflows so automation can execute them flawlessly every time. This gives you brand compliance and strategic consistency across every channel for every account, rather than multiple people doing things their own way.
A DAOS also enables you to implement automated budget management to prevent overspending and underspending, giving you budgeting precision that is simply unattainable using manual, human-led processes.
For example, Johnson Group (a full-funnel marketing and advertising firm for franchises and national brands) implemented Fluency’s budget automation to pace budgets for a key franchise account running over 1,000 campaigns. They selected Fluency as their Digital Advertising Operating System (DAOS) because it solved one of their biggest struggles: pacing for multi-location campaigns across both Google Ads and Meta Ads.
The Johnson Group team uses the full breadth of Fluency’s budgeting and pacing tools to achieve their customers’ goals. Now, they can quickly address critical pacing updates across multiple publishers from one place, en masse.
“We've really automated the whole process and don’t have to touch anything,” said Jared Drahonovsky, Group Media Manager at Johnson Group. “Fluency automatically refreshes every hour from our Google spreadsheets, and then it’s good to go.”
Instead of four or five team members spending 12-15 hours a week on pacing, the team now spends less than five hours every month to perform the same tasks. That’s 90% less time spent on budgeting pacing tasks! It also gives the team time for strategic planning and process improvements (something they didn’t have consistent time to do before automation).
“Fluency helps reduce underspend to marginal nominal numbers and reduces overspend—quite literally—to zero for our customers,” said Drahonovsky. "If your accounts are as big as some of the ones we work on, it's not realistic to do the necessary work at scale."
2. You can automatically run complex, real-time strategies directly from data sources
A DAOS makes even your most impossible-sounding strategies possible by bringing together first- and third-party advertising data sources: weather feeds, product inventories, multichannel performance data, and more. With access to the right data, automation can execute complex, real-time strategies at scale.
Strategists can codify actions within the DAOS based on your company’s tried-and-true strategic decisions. This enables automation to execute specific strategies when the right conditions apply. For example, you can program automation to automatically adjust bids based on predefined triggers like specific CPC rates or Impressions. These sophisticated, data-driven strategies are crucial for gaining advantages in competitive markets.
That’s what Nicole Crisbacher, Senior Marketing Manager at Union Street Media, and her two employees did. Union Street Media is a real estate website and marketing intelligence platform providing cutting-edge digital marketing services for real estate agents. Their national real estate clients range from small mom-and-pop brokers to enterprise clients with more than 500 agents and offices.
Nicole and her lean team manage all paid media for more than 950 real estate campaigns. With a Digital Advertising Operating System, the Union Street Media team can give clients a unique competitive advantage by building ads right from MLS listing data. MLS listing data updates every four hours, which is too often for a human team to manage. Pushing these updates to automation means Crisbacher and her team can “offer top-notch custom advertising solutions to our real estate clients at an accessible price point.”
They can also set up automation rules that:
- Automatically turn ads off on every channel once a property sells
- Update ads in real-time with details like pricing changes or listing status
- Include dynamic data like street addresses, the listing agent, and listing or sold prices in ad copy or headlines
- Run ads for active or recently sold listings, plus promote open houses
“Anything listing related wouldn't be possible without Fluency Blueprints,” according to Crisbacher. “Some of our customers have over 20,000 changes made in their accounts every month.”
“We have two people running our daily ad operations, but Fluency’s automation and AI tools make us operate like a team of five.”
The great thing about rule-based automation is that it extends far beyond a single use case. Need ads to dynamically update based on inventory changes? Want to launch thousands of hyper-localized campaigns simultaneously? Automation gives your team speed and processing power beyond what humans can accomplish in an 8-hour workday.
3. Centralized, automated operations drive unified multichannel strategies
Centralizing multichannel data and workflows into one system is the only way to overcome the operational fragmentation caused by offshoring. In fact, over 80% of top advertising executives said that using a DAOS improved their company’s operational scalability in 90 days or less.
With a DAOS, all campaign data—for every client, ad set, and channel—automatically syncs into one unified platform. Multichannel performance data is consistent, timely, and truly standardized. That means you don’t have to chase down updates from teams across the globe, reconcile mismatched formats, and lose valuable time manually aggregating channel data.
Working in this way also means your most talented analysts don’t have to waste time wrangling data from offshore partners. They can access real-time, cross-channel performance data without delays or data gaps. This gives them the clarity and agility they need to make smart, real-time decisions. Operationally speaking, they can also:
- Make bulk copy or budgeting changes across all channels simultaneously
- Automatically create comprehensive, cross-channel reports for any account
- Use integrated, advertising-specific AI to analyze multichannel performance for trends, anomalies, or optimizations
- Act on real-time data insights in just a few clicks for maximum performance (and results)
BH Management Services (BH), a multifamily owner/operator enterprise with over 300 properties across 30+ states, wanted to move its paid media program in-house to reduce costs. They knew an agency wouldn’t be flexible or agile enough to adjust bids or make strategic recommendations for 300+ properties every day. However, with only one paid media employee in-house, it was clear they needed a way to eliminate unnecessary AdOps tasks and enable multichannel management at scale.
The BH team selected Fluency as their AdOps partner because they wanted the ability to launch, manage, and optimize multichannel and multi-location campaigns at scale. Now, they can:
- Quickly move budgets at the account, campaign, and partner level for maximum performance results
- Test out different messaging or assets, then implement the winning strategies across other relevant channels with a few clicks
- Dial in campaigns with detailed specs, reducing the potential for human error
- Use their own data to improve ad quality, easily including property-specific details that would be impossible for an agency to pull off using traditional manual methods
We’ve substantially reduced program costs, while improving measurement and reporting,” said Ashlee Sanders, former Manager of Digital Strategy at BH Management. “We’ve saved the organization an estimated $813,000 in costs alone, and we’ve lowered our average cost per guest card (CPC) by 40% YoY.”
Striking the right human-technology balance for scalable growth
When growth is the goal, expanding your team feels like a natural next step. But simply adding more people, regardless of their location, doesn't solve the core operational challenges of manual, human-reliant advertising management. Continuing to rely on a solely human workforce will introduce new risks, costly errors, and even more siloed workflows as your company grows.
Instead, the real problem you should be solving for is how to move away from a fully human-run advertising operation toward one that makes the best use of both your team and technology. No matter how big or small your human workforce is, supplementing their talents and strengths with automation and AI solutions can put your company on a more strategic, sustainable, and cost-effective path to growth.
Scaling sustainably shouldn’t be about choosing between people and technology. You need to find the right balance between them. Want to see how other leading advertisers are finding that balance? Make sure to get our Executive Playbook for Scalable Advertising Operations.
