In this Q&A, monday.com’s Regional Director GTM (AI, Products, Industry) APJ monday.com Gavin Watson and Datacom’s Senior Marketing Manager Erin Garrett share practical ways to cut email, tame spreadsheets, improve visibility and use AI without the hype.
Gavin Watson (monday.com): Budgets and resources rarely grow in line with expectations. Teams are being asked to do more with less and deliver faster. We’re seeing an explosion in campaigns – many marketers tell us volumes have tripled in the last couple of years – plus content bottlenecks and the chaos of spreadsheets, endless WIP meetings and thousands of emails.
Erin Garrett (Datacom): Our CMD team at Datacom uses monday.com every day to manage our campaigns and projects. Our marketing team is based across Australia, New Zealand and the Philippines and is just shy of 50 people across marketing, communications, digital and design – supporting an organisation of more than 6,000 people. A centralised platform is critical: requests come in one place, information isn’t fragmented across emails, and campaign owners can keep everything moving.
Gavin Watson: Dashboards are the heartbeat of monday.com. They sit above the work so you can visualise the data that matters – spend, resources, output – and share it as read‑only or interactive views. Every tile is a widget and fully customisable, and we also provide templates. With monday.com's AI, you can generate an executive portfolio summary that highlights key trends and risks with a click. That’s saved me hours.
Gavin Watson: Create one consistent doorway for work to come in. Dynamic briefing forms only ask for what’s relevant – if someone selects ‘Instagram post’, they’ll only be prompted for the information needed for that task. Automations then route the brief to the right team, trigger dependencies and notify stakeholders. That’s how you replace inbox clutter with a reliable workflow.
Gavin Watson: Track capacity at both team and individual levels in real time and run ‘what if’ scenarios. monday.com’s resource planner lets you filter by role, skills and location, then allocate hours and rebalance when someone is over capacity. Many teams also use it to schedule shared assets – editing suites or camera equipment – not just people.
Erin Garrett: We’re geographically dispersed, so shared visibility and resource planning are big wins. We can keep a campaign on track even if someone is away, because tasks, timelines and ownership are clear. Automations also help us use the tool consistently and keep momentum.
Gavin Watson: Spreadsheets are great for numbers, not for orchestrating creative work. Start by defining the outcomes and metrics you need, then build the boards and dashboards around those. You can import data, standardise fields and replace manual updates with automations so the system stays current without extra effort.
Gavin Watson: Getting buy-in is often the hardest step. Start with the reports leaders want and work backwards. Make the new way simpler than the old way. Find internal champions. monday.com is low-code and no-code, so once the baseline is set, teams can keep improving it. Consistency is the goal.
Erin Garrett: We have a project manager who assigns work and keeps us on track. That ownership, plus automations and clear boards, helps adoption stick.
Gavin Watson: Don’t add AI for the sake of it. First ask what problem you’re solving and where AI fits. We’re focused on making execution more efficient, not replacing people. Strong use cases include turning briefs into structured tasks, generating executive summaries and automating routine responses – always with clear guardrails.
Erin Garrett: Centralise requests immediately – even with a simple form – so information lands in one place. It stops the email chase and makes it easier to assign ownership and deadlines.
Gavin Watson: Pick a high-pressure workflow such as approvals, define the outcome metrics and pilot it with a small group. Prove the value fast, then scale.
Gavin Watson: The key is to set just enough structure so everyone knows where work lives and how it moves, but not so much that it becomes restrictive. monday.com lets each team work in the view that suits them – lists, timelines, boards or calendars – while still feeding into the same shared system. That means creative teams can stay in their preferred way of working without sacrificing visibility or consistency for the wider organisation.
Erin Garrett: Having a shared view of every campaign and task eliminates guesswork. If something is slipping, it’s obvious early and we can reassign work or adjust timelines. It strengthens trust too – leaders can see progress without chasing updates, and team members feel more supported because workload pressures are visible and can be addressed.
Gavin Watson: Real‑time dashboards make it easy to understand which campaigns, channels or deliverables support which objectives. If priorities change, you can reflect that instantly across boards and workflows. Teams don’t have to hunt for context – it’s already embedded in the system.
Erin Garrett: It’s really important to acknowledge that people adopt new tools at different speeds. What helped us was involving team members early, creating simple templates, and using automations to guide the behaviour we needed. Small wins matter – once people see the benefit, adoption follows.
Gavin Watson: Start consolidating. Map out what each tool is being used for and identify overlaps. Often, monday.com can replace several systems and bring the workflows together. Reducing context switching is one of the fastest ways to improve focus and speed.
The shift described by monday.com and Datacom – centralised workflows, real-time visibility and purposeful AI – is about more than making marketing teams efficient. It’s about creating the foundation for better customer outcomes. When campaigns are connected, data is unified and priorities are transparent, organisations are better positioned to deliver the seamless, personalised digital experiences customers expect. Datacom partners with your brand to translate that operational clarity into growth, applying design thinking, user research, information architecture and responsive design to connect every channel and touchpoint into a cohesive, value-driven experience.
