The news: Marketing leaders struggle with a production bottleneck where technical complexity limits campaign volume. This is especially true for large organizations that often possess the infrastructure for scale but lack the workflow to generate assets at the same pace. 

OpenAI partnered with marketing production platform Knak to shift campaign creation away from slow, manual processes toward automated agent workflows.

• How it works: Knak’s model context protocol (MCP) allows AI agents to work in its marketing production platform 24/7 to execute campaign creation tasks. Project requests occur in Slack where collaboration, reviews, and approvals take place in real time. 
• The result: Teams see faster campaign delivery across brand management, AI-assisted content creation, personalization, and translation.

Why it’s worth watching: “The challenge of creating campaigns was always a difficult and lengthy process reserved for highly technical people or outsourced to expensive agencies,” Brendan Farnand, Knak’s co-founder and CCO, told EMARKETER.

• When OpenAI started using the Knak platform over a year ago, asset build time dropped to 4.6 minutes from 24 hours—a 99.7% decrease in time spent.
• “Their collaboration and review workflow also reduced quite a bit, from one week to 2.7 days on average, so that’s a 61% improvement,” Farnand said.
• Translation and localization processes also received a lift. “It used to take between one and four weeks to translate each campaign, and now they are being done in 20 minutes,” he said. 

Zooming in: Knak, which serves large enterprises in pharmaceutical and biotech industries where strict oversight is mandatory, has built-in governance to ensure every campaign stays within legal frameworks. It also counts Meta, Google, Stripe, and Amazon as its customers.

The company sees itself as an alternative for marketers struggling to create campaigns in large platforms like Salesforce. "They’re incredibly powerful platforms and are good for segmentation and targeting, but the creation and production of content is an afterthought,” Farnand said. 

Implications for brands: Speed gains in asset production don’t automatically translate to better campaign performance—volume and quality are different metrics. Production gains also make human oversight an imperative to retain brand voice.

The bottleneck in campaign production has long been a quiet tax on marketing ambition—slowing down teams that have the strategy but not the speed. Brands should look at how today’s campaign creation solutions can cover gaps, cut down outsourcing costs, and create new efficiencies. Run A-B tests on output to gauge quality and ROI.

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