Ability to measure return on investment (ROI) is a hallmark of the modern marketer, but what about return on time invested (ROTI)?

The fact is, there is virtually no return on time invested. ROTI is calculated as time saved divided by time invested, meaning for many marketers, the ROTI is negative.

Workloads are growing larger, time frames are getting shorter, the systems being used are becoming increasingly complex and, in some cases, budgets are getting smaller.

Time is one of our most valuable commodities because no one has it. You can never get it back once it’s gone.

But the tide is beginning to turn for the time-poor marketer. It is those that are able to use their time more effectively that are enjoying the most success. One integrated performance marketing company is giving marketers back their time through an intuitive process that streamlines campaign management.

Bench, a MarTech solutions provider, realised the painful inefficiencies of programmatic workflow and has developed a campaign management platform to solve this challenge. It has proven to deliver an 86 per cent reduction in time spent on tasks throughout the programmatic workflow cycle.

One of the biggest time wasters is without doubt the spreadsheet and reporting that speaks to the campaign workflow. The art of navigating through multiple systems to keep track of spending has become an unwanted skill for many marketers.

Bench gives its customers the ability to manage reporting through real-time analytics via the Bench Platform, allowing for immediate changes to spending and limiting the reliance on the documents. Campaign agility at its finest.

Gil Snir, Chief Commercial Officer at Bench sees this as the missing link in programmatic. “Providing our businesses with a single campaign view has turned media planning into a seamless, real-time process,” Snir said.

Mediahub managing director Andrew Livingston knows about the marketer’s time constraint all too well. “The more tools and systems we’ve been adding for siloed tasks, the more they pile up and it is actually becoming time-consuming for the team just to manage them all,” he said.

Similarly, rather than spending hours on a brief that will most likely end up in the bin, marketers can pull the main metrics from a brief into an automated workflow and start building a digital media plan.

“It means we’ve increased speed to market and created more time to focus on strategy and gaining unfair share for our clients,” Livingston said.

The concept of automation is often met with the fear of human jobs being lost to robots.

In some cases, this is a valid concern. But the reality is automation’s greatest value is its ability to free people from repetitive and monotonous tasks and allow more time to be spent on the innately human activities like problem solving and creativity.

Research from consultancy firm McKinsey & Company recently found Australian workers will spend over 60 per cent more time using technological skills and over 40 per cent more time using social and emotional skills due to automation.

Bench demonstrates this potential through its ability to give marketers the parts of their day that they enjoy and ultimately asks the question– if you had the time back, how would you spend it?

This article originally appeared in the Jul/Aug edition of B&T Magazine. Don’t miss our next issue by subscribing here.