20 Minutes to a Campaign: How a Marketing Agency Rebuilt Its Entire Workflow Around AI

Dan Jones of Marketing Agency Near You doesn’t mince words about what AI has done to his business: it’s changed everything. Not incrementally — fundamentally. At the April 2026 DIG Philly meeting, he shared how his agency has rebuilt its workflows from the ground up with AI at the center, and the results are hard to argue with.

The most striking number he dropped: campaign ideation that used to take a week now takes about 20 minutes.

The Old Model Doesn’t Work Anymore

The traditional marketing agency model relies heavily on people. Junior marketers brainstorming campaigns. Teams iterating on concepts. Multiple rounds of review before anything gets in front of a client or goes live. That model has a built-in ceiling — both on speed and on cost.

Dan’s agency has moved past it. “We don’t need a room full of ten junior marketers to come up with the next campaign,” he said. The core team handles ideation, with AI doing the heavy lifting on generating concepts, copy frameworks, and campaign structures. What was a week-long process for a minimum viable campaign is now a 20-minute exercise.

That’s not a modest efficiency gain. That’s a different category of operation.

AI Is a Non-Negotiable — Literally

One detail from Dan’s remarks that stood out: being proficient with AI isn’t a bonus skill at his agency. It’s a hiring requirement. Whether you’re a local team member or working offshore, you have to be into AI.

This is a culture shift that more businesses are beginning to make, but few have formalized it as clearly as Dan describes. Rather than treating AI adoption as optional or as something that happens organically over time, his agency has made it an explicit part of who they hire and how they operate. The message it sends internally — and to clients — is that AI isn’t a tool they’re experimenting with. It’s how they work.

Perhaps the most practical example he shared involves campaign analysis. When performance on a Google Ads campaign dropped unexpectedly, instead of spending hours combing through data, Dan fed the campaign performance into ChatGPT, described what he was seeing, and asked what he might be missing. The AI surfaced a simple explanation: the drop coincided with the Eagles Super Bowl parade. No one in the Philadelphia area was thinking about buying or selling a house that day. What could have been a long analytical rabbit hole resolved in minutes.

“Everything is just speed at this point,” he said.

What This Means for Real Estate Investors

Most real estate investors aren’t running marketing agencies, but the principles translate directly. If you’re doing any kind of outreach — direct mail, digital ads, social content, email campaigns to your buyer or seller list — the same efficiency gains are available to you.

You don’t need to hire a copywriter to draft five variations of a postcard headline. You don’t need to spend a weekend writing content for a drip email sequence. You don’t need to guess at why your last campaign underperformed when you can hand the data to AI and get a diagnostic in minutes.

The investors who are treating AI as an optional add-on are going to find themselves competing against people — and agencies — who’ve built it into the foundation of everything they do. Dan’s agency is a clear example of what that looks like when it’s done right.

Rob Coldwell and TJ Hock are the owners of Rentwell Property Management. They were the featured speakers at the April meeting of DIG Philly in King of Prussia. Hear their full presentation and many more on our podcast “Living Well with Rentwell”.

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For more information on property management in the Avenue of the Arts area, schedule a free owners’ consultation at Rentwell.com