Paid media teams almost never run short on ideas. They run short on the hours to execute them.
DoubleVerify's 2025 Global Insights research puts a number on the gap: campaign managers spend 26% of their time â over ten hours a week â on manual optimization. Bid-modifier tweaks, budget reallocations, threshold adjustments. That's not admin around the edges; it's a full working day, every week. For North American agencies DoubleVerify estimates it at $17,000+ a year, per team member, spent on repetition.
Here's what the data says is happening, why it persists, and how to claw the time back without losing control.
What the 2025 report actually found
The findings draw on DV's platform intelligence plus a survey of 1,970 marketing and advertising decision-makers. The operations headline is that 26% / 10+ hours figure. The tell underneath it: 91% of marketers say they're using or planning to use third-party AI or automated bidding tools outside their DSPs to keep up. The industry already knows the manual load isn't sustainable. DV's own framing is the part that stings â campaign managers sliding into reactive "facilitators" instead of strategists.
Why the manual work survives
It survives because the job is full of repeatable steps that feel too risky to automate without guardrails: pacing and budget checks, QA for broken links and disapprovals, copying changes across accounts, exporting data for the weekly report, nudging thresholds as conditions move. The work runs on a weekly rhythm but it's smeared across platforms, sheets, and dashboards, it's easy to skip a step under pressure, and it's hard to standardize because the playbook lives in someone's head, not a system. So teams keep clicking â clicking feels safe.
The real cost isn't the hours. It's what the hours displace.
"Ten hours a week" is the easy stat. The expensive part is what those hours replace: the strategic time that should go to tests, creative, and targeting; the consistency you lose when three people run three versions of the "same" process; the speed you lose when every cycle waits on manual execution; and the confidence you lose when mistakes turn into fire drills that breed more manual checking. That's why teams feel busy without getting faster.
How to attack it without a replatforming project
Write your weekly ops work down as a process, not a task list: Monitor â Diagnose â Decide â Execute â Document â Report. Then look at where the hours actually go inside that chain â what you check every week, what triggers action, what gets repeated across accounts, what you rebuild in spreadsheets each time.
Then pick one workflow to automate first. Not "everything" â one: something that happens weekly, is manual today, is error-prone, and produces a predictable output. Pacing and budget guardrails, a QA and hygiene sweep, the weekly performance report, or spend/conversion anomaly alerts are all good first targets. On approach, teams are choosing between staying fully manual (control, but slow and unscalable), DIY scripting (flexible, but now you maintain software), single-purpose tools (quick wins, but template-shaped), and workflow automation (your actual weekly process, made repeatable). The goal isn't more automation. It's more repeatability.
What good automation looks like
The DV numbers don't argue for handing everything to an autonomous agent. They argue for automating the repeatable steps, keeping a human on the calls that need judgment, and having a record of what ran and what it did. That's how you get the time back and stay confident at the same time.
Where pi-automate fits
If your core problem is "manual work eats the week," another dashboard won't fix it â your weekly process needs to become a system. That's what pi-automate does: it implements your playbook as workflows your team runs, so pacing, QA, reporting, and routine optimizations stop living in spreadsheets and platform tabs. The fastest place to start is the one workflow you already run every week.
FAQ
How many hours do campaign managers spend on manual optimization?
DoubleVerify's 2025 Global Insights research reports 26% of their time â over ten hours a week.
What counts as "manual optimization"?
DV cites work like tweaking bid modifiers, reallocating budgets, and adjusting performance thresholds.
If it wastes time, why do teams keep doing it manually?
Because manual execution feels safer. Most teams lack a workflow system with repeatability, approvals, and run history, so they fall back on clicks and spreadsheets.