Many enterprise advertising leaders believe they must create a custom, one-off strategy for every client. If every client is unique, every campaign must be too, right? This mindset, while well-intentioned, is one of the biggest factors limiting scalable operations and growth in advertising today.
Top-performing advertisers have moved past this belief. They understand that a client's specific needs may be unique, but the underlying challenges (and best solutions) often fall into predictable patterns that can be replicated or automated at scale.
By identifying and documenting these patterns, these advertisers move away from time-consuming, one-off workflows in favor of repeatable advertising frameworks. This shift transforms advertising operations from a series of custom projects into a scalable, more profitable business model that enables higher profit margins and significant growth.
This article will help you identify patterns, strategies, and operational frameworks within your own advertising business. It will also outline how to use patterns to build a strong foundation for long-term success and growth.
The fallacy of "every ad strategy is custom"
Creativity, nuanced strategy, and speed are highly valued in advertising, so it makes sense that many advertisers believe in the strength of their unique and custom approaches. But the reality is that there are only so many ways to say, “We provide this great service,” or “Come buy this wonderful thing.” A few tweaks in products, services, and word choices are really all that separate your digital ads from others.
Relying too heavily on a custom approach for every client will make it impossible to scale your operations. Hand-typing everything into each individual ad platform isn’t “custom” work: it’s manual, time-consuming work that isn’t scalable.
Additionally, if custom strategies require employees with unique talents, your company is only as good as the people you have running your advertising at any moment in time. If (or when) you lose that employee, the odds are high that you’ll also lose the business they manage.
Reliance on a custom strategy for all isn’t a scalable framework. Every campaign becomes a one-off project, which limits operational efficiency and portfolio growth. In order to scale your operations, profitability, and account portfolios, you need an advertising approach anchored in repeatable patterns.
What are examples of advertising patterns and advertising playbooks?
Think of advertising patterns as repeatable recipes for campaign launches. These patterns are what make up your company’s unique advertising playbooks. Advertising playbooks (also called strategies or frameworks) define how you run campaigns for specific industries, the commonalities in your approach, and how you make decisions about what to do in specific situations.
Advertising patterns come in all formats. Here are good places to look for patterns in your campaign launches:
- Campaign structure: Number and type of campaigns; grouping method; ad group/ad set structure
- Targeting rules: Audience lists; geo targeting; demographics/interests
- Naming conventions: Standardized formats for campaigns, ad sets, and ads with placeholders for variables
- Budget rules: Allocation method; pacing strategy; how budgets tie to feeds
- Creative assignments: Which assets go with which audiences; rules for rotation
- Data feeds and automation rules: Sources for budgets, inventory, and audience data— and how they trigger builds
You can also look for patterns in what your clients sell (such as clients who both sell services instead of products), messaging frameworks (such as value-driven messages or product-feature-driven messages), and pre-launch quality checklists used internally to double-check campaigns for accuracy. All of these documented “rules” define the playbooks your team uses to build, launch, manage, and report on campaigns.
Why are advertising patterns crucial to scalability?
Building and launching automated workflows at scale is easier if you can find patterns in processes and client strategies. If these patterns are clear and consistent, they can be automated for scalable advertising operations. Advertisers with well-defined patterns can adapt more quickly to new opportunities or challenges, giving them a competitive edge in a crowded space.
Most importantly, patterns that inform your strategic playbooks can be replicated by both people and technology. This makes you less reliant on specific employees because your strategies are codified for any qualified person (or automated workflow) to follow and execute. It also means you can more easily integrate scalable technologies like automation to exponentially increase workloads without increasing effort.
Patterns enable scalability by giving you:
- Efficiency gains: Patterns reduce the time spent on repetitive tasks by making processes repeatable for both humans and tech. Instead of building every campaign from scratch, a templated approach (with different variables you can swap in or out) allows teams to launch campaigns faster.
- Strategic consistency across multichannel campaigns: Patterns ensure that campaigns align with brand guidelines, regulatory requirements, and client-specific goals. This reduces errors and improves the quality of outputs, even as each team member manages more campaigns or accounts.
- A strong foundation for automation: Automation requires clear, repeatable rules to function effectively and at scale. Patterns provide the much-needed structure to automate workflows across a range of AdOps processes, such as campaign setup or reporting.
- Better profit margins: With pattern-supported playbooks, you can grow your advertising operations without always hiring more people. Our latest data suggests that after a year with Fluency, the typical ad strategist can handle two to four times as many accounts as they could before—without adding more staff.
- Reduced reliance on tribal knowledge: By codifying processes into repeatable patterns, you move away from relying on the "tribal knowledge" held by a few key employees. What was once an art becomes a standardized, scalable science. This makes your operations more resilient and less susceptible to disruption when team members leave.
How can I identify patterns in my advertising strategies and AdOps workflows?
The key to identifying patterns in your advertising strategies starts with understanding what parts of your strategies are different and what makes them different. These nuanced choices can all be mapped out in decision trees that make up your playbooks, outlining how employees should handle specific situations, client industries, or KPIs.
As you look for these patterns in your strategies and AdOps workflows, ask yourself these questions:
Questions to identify strategic advertising patterns:
- Client industry verticals: Do we have documented strategies for specific industries like real estate or HVAC?
- What clients sell: For clients who advertise services (e.g., home repair, legal services), do we use similar audience strategies to reach local markets?
- Audience segments: Can we identify shared targeting characteristics across our most successful campaigns?
- Lifecycle stage campaigns: Are there consistent tactics we use for different parts of the customer journey, such as nurturing leads or retargeting website visitors?
- Messaging frameworks: Do we use consistent ad copy approaches, like creating a sense of urgency or using localized language for different regions?
Questions to identify campaign creation and execution patterns:
- Campaign and account launches: Do we follow similar steps when onboarding new clients or launching campaigns within the same industry?
- Budget pacing: Do we have defined strategies for how we spend budgets? For example, do we spend evenly throughout the month or focus on seasonal trends?
- Reporting: Do we have a standard set of metrics and reporting intervals for all our client reports?
- Quality assurance (QA): Is there a pre-launch checklist we use to ensure things like URLs, images, and ad copy are correct?
Why treating everything as “custom” hinders scale
You might feel like you’re providing clients with personalized “white glove” service when every ad campaign is built from scratch. In reality, this approach significantly limits your company’s own growth. Without implementing standardized processes across your AdOps, it will be impossible to scale. Your team is constantly reinventing the wheel instead of building on past successes, draining both time and resources.
Sticking to a linear growth model—where every few new accounts means hiring another person—will limit your company to only growing as fast as you can hire and train new employees. This is slow, expensive, and getting harder to do as the talent pool shrinks. If long-term and sustainable growth is your goal, you must use a different approach.
The extra hours your team puts into building bespoke strategies and campaigns for clients also translate into higher operational costs. These inefficiencies can snowball, making it harder to grow your profit margins even as your business grows. In short, your profitability flatlines even as your portfolio grows.
The truth is that advertisers who don’t find a way to replicate and scale their strategies and patterns will struggle to grow beyond a certain threshold. You must find a way to move away from a “custom only” approach to one that’s repeatable, scalable, and efficient.
Your path to scalable advertising automation, built on patterns
The future of enterprise advertising isn't bespoke. The most successful advertising agencies understand sustainable growth isn't about constant reinvention. It’s about scalable, strategic replication.
Start by working with your team to identify patterns in both your strategic approaches and operational processes. Document and codify these patterns into playbooks that anyone on your AdOps team can follow and implement. The more time you dedicate to expanding your playbook library, the easier it will be to implement time-saving technologies like advertising automation and AI down the line.
