The first time Andrew Harding, Vice President of Marketing and Content Partnerships at Slate Studios (a division of Slate), stared down the barrel of a spreadsheet packed with hundreds of unorganized contacts, his instinct wasn’t to roll up his sleeves—it was to think smarter.
“There’s so much else on my to-do list,” Andrew says. “I could spend hours doing this... or I could not.”
Slate is best known for its sharp editorial voice on politics and culture. But Andrew leads a different part of the business: Slate Studios, the branded content division that partners with advertisers to craft premium campaigns aligned with Slate’s values, without touching the newsroom.
That work requires strategy, storytelling, and speed. But speed is hard to maintain when tedious, manual tasks slow you down.
“I was facing this repetitive task and thought, ‘What if I could make this task do itself?’” Andrew recalls.
That moment of “playful laziness,” as he describes it, kicked off a journey into automation. What began as a small experiment with Zapier evolved into full-fledged Zapier Agents—AI-powered assistants that now handle lead generation, data reformatting, and even competitive research.
The results? Thousands of high-quality leads, hundreds of hours saved, and a scalable workflow that helps Slate operate with efficiency.
Slate’s results, by the numbers:
2,000+ qualified leads generated in one month with a single Agent.
Hundreds of hours saved across prospecting, contact formatting, and content optimization.
Dozens of hours saved per campaign, enabling the team to scale without additional headcount.
About Slate:
Company size: 200-250 employees
Industry: Media
Location: New York City, New York
Turning blog posts into marketing engines
To start, Andrew needed a way to scale Slate Studios’ content marketing efforts. They were creating high-quality, human-written blog content—but every follow-up step, from SEO research to metadata, was a manual time-sink. That’s where “Content Booster,” their first Zap, came in.
What the Zap does:
A Google Sheet acts as the control center. The team drops in a finished blog post or subject line.
The Zap routes that content through ChatGPT, which:
Generates SEO-optimized keywords
Creates metadata for better performance tracking
Suggests URL slugs and social media breakdowns
Even outlines a video structure for TikTok or Instagram
PULL QUOTE: “It’s not just about saving time—it’s about leveling up your own thinking while the automation works alongside you,” Andrew says.
This automation saved Slate Studios dozens of hours and helped them scale faster without sacrificing quality. And that was just the beginning.
Prospecting with precision: Slate’s AI-powered lead Agent
Soon after the content workflow proved successful, Andrew turned to something even bigger: lead generation.
Slate Studios needed to identify advertisers and potential enterprise customers, but manual prospecting couldn’t keep up with demand. So, Andrew built a Zapier Agent designed to be an intelligent sales assistant.
How the Agent works:
The Agent is trained on Slate’s target advertiser personas and their audience strategy.
It searches the internet for ideal accounts and contacts based on Andrew’s parameters.
It then returns the leads in a structured format—ready for qualification and CRM upload.
The output drops into Google Sheets, and from there can be manually reviewed or automatically routed into Salesforce, Instantly, or other outbound tools.
PULL QUOTE: “It generated over 2,000 leads in a single month. “It generated so many leads that we’re still working through them months later," Andrew says.
Setting up the agent was quick and intuitive—Andrew was able to start generating valuable leads in less time than it would’ve taken to complete the task manually.
Cleaning up contact chaos—automatically
Sales success depends on clean data—but Slate’s contact lists were fragmented and messy after years of collecting data across tools and campaigns. To solve this, Andrew launched ‘Data Wrangler,’ an intelligent Agent that cleans and reformats legacy datasets automatically.
What this Agent does:
Pulls existing contacts from multiple sources.
Cleans, prioritizes, and reformats data for upload into CRMs or outreach platforms.
Filters leads by relevance to campaign goals or vertical-specific outreach.
PULL QUOTE: “This Agent handles the kind of detailed data cleanup that used to take our team hours—and now it’s done seamlessly in the background,” Andrew says.
By offloading this frustrating admin work, Slate turned hours of manual effort into a background process—freeing the team to focus on strategic outreach and relationship-building.
Spotting trends with an automated view counter
To support campaign ideation and strategy, Andrew built a micro-agent designed to track and log performance data from YouTube video series—what he calls “Trend Scout.”
Instead of manually combing through analytics or spreadsheets, the Agent extracts key metrics like video titles, view counts, and how recently they were published, then organizes that information into a Google Sheet.
This lightweight Agent helps Slate quickly get a pulse on how video content is performing over time, allowing the team to establish benchmarks and spot content trends without needing to access the backend of every platform.
PULL QUOTE: “Trend Scout gives us quick, structured insights from public video data—what used to take hours of digging, we now get automatically,” Andrew says.
Trend Scout offers a fast, accessible way to turn publicly available performance data into actionable insightssaving time and supporting smarter strategy.
Scaling smarter with human-first automation
Andrew emphasizes that these Agents enhance the team's ability to accomplish goals. By handling repetitive and time-intensive tasks, the Agents free the team to focus on more strategic and creative work.
Automation follows instructions, but AI adapts. Together, they power a system that helps Slate Studios move faster while maintaining quality and control. Andrew sees it as the ultimate advantage for smaller teams looking to punch above their weight.
PULL QUOTE: “What used to be overwhelming is now scalable,” Andrew says. “I don’t have to choose between doing good work and doing a lot of it. With Zapier, I can do both.”
Slate Studios continues to push the limits of what’s possible with automation—whether it’s parsing advertiser briefs, benchmarking performance, or building scalable systems that support their mission.
With Agents embedded in their stack, Slate is positioned to scale smarter—and keep creativity at the heart of their strategy.
