Build your marketing calendar: no decks, just clarity

Every week, marketing teams lose a full day to reporting, not to strategy or creative work.

Most marketing organizations spend 20% or more of their workweek—roughly one full day—just reporting on what they’re doing. Instead of working on improving campaigns or shaping strategy, they are just assembling updates.

As a result, visibility is manual, exhausting, and often inexistent, or trapped between disconnected spreadsheets and slide decks that go stale the moment they’re sent.

With Adobe Workfront Planning, you can create a single-place environment where strategy and execution meet by adding a campaign calendar that does not touch production work, so you can visualize campaigns with clarity.

The hidden cost of shadow planning

As a marketing leader or a project manager, you know this tension well: strategy lives in one place, while visibility lives somewhere else entirely. According to Forrester, 63% of organizations still rely on spreadsheets for budgeting and planning, locking critical information inside siloed files.

This gap creates what many teams quietly accept as normal: shadow planning which is the invisible, ad-hoc work done outside the system just to keep leadership informed. And when visibility is manual, it’s always behind reality.

The data tells the story:

The result is predictable: duplicate effort, version-control chaos, and hours spent maintaining artifacts that immediately fall out of date.

Create a single place where strategy and execution meet

Workfront Planning offers teams something most marketing organizations lack: a strategic Home.

It’s a unified, live campaign calendar where planning and execution finally converge without touching production work. Think of it as a safe playground - a place to explore, test, and visualize campaign strategy with clarity.

What changes when visibility is built-in

The following subsections explore the benefits of what happens when you build visibility in your processes.

Break the status-meeting cycle

No more manual timeline decks. Research shows that 87% of marketers cite “triaging data” as their top time-waster. When updates happen automatically as work progresses, status stops being a meeting agenda item and it becomes a product feature.

Make campaign context obvious

Creative work no longer floats in isolation. Teams can see how individual efforts scale into the broader campaign roadmap without digging through folders or chasing updates.

With live visibility, you can spend 70% of your time focused on what’s next, not recounting what already happened.

Explore safely

Because the platform can use sample data, teams can experiment with views, filters, and other structures without risking real production timelines.

Become a strategist

When hours once spent on reporting come back to you, your role fundamentally changes. You move from being the person who documents the work to the person who directs it.

This role change is how you move from being a historian to being a strategist.

Stop being a historian

In the traditional model, marketing teams often spend 70% of their status meetings recounting what already happened. By the time a slide deck is finished, the data is already historical; it is a snapshot of a past that has already shifted. You are effectively acting as a historian, manually compiling records of work that is already moving without you.

Start operating as a strategist

With a unified calendar, the data is always live, which flips the meeting cadence: leadership can spend 70% of their time on what’s next.

You move from reporting the news to making the news. You focus on strategy, creative output, and campaign optimization.

This strategic shift is built on the following three core pillars of live visibility:

This trust is the foundation for making bold, data-informed decisions.

Getting started with the marketing calendar

Workfront Planning is available to paying customers and is enabled through administrative setup. This means that the System Administrator controls access to the platform.

If your organization already uses Adobe Workfront, getting started with Workfront Planning typically begins with a conversation about enabling Planning within your existing environment. If you’re not yet a customer, the first step is to explore whether Planning is the right fit for your organization.

If manual reporting is draining your team, start the conversation. Talk with your Workfront Administrator about enabling Workfront Planning, or reach out to Adobe to learn how Planning can bring real-time clarity to your campaign strategy.

If you have seen Workfront Planning or have already purchased it and you want to start exploring it, see Get started with Adobe Workfront Planning.

Best practices for making it stick

Dos

Don’ts