Most delays are not production time — they are waiting on a yes. The approval structure we use to keep a build moving without cutting the client out.
Ask an agency why a campaign launched three weeks late and the answer is rarely that the work took three weeks. It took four days. The rest was waiting.
The most common failure is discovering at the approval stage that the person reviewing the work cannot actually authorize it. Establish at onboarding who signs off on creative, who signs off on budget, and whether those are the same person. Write it in the account record.
Every approval request carries a stated window and a stated default. "If we have not heard back by Thursday, we proceed with option A." This is not aggressive — it is the only structure that respects everyone’s time, and clients consistently prefer it once they have experienced the alternative.
The default has to be genuinely reasonable, and it has to be something you would defend if it went live. If you would not be comfortable with the default shipping, it is not a default, it is a threat.
A headline test is reversible in an hour. A brand-level messaging change is not. Bundling them into one approval request means the reversible thing waits on the irreversible one.
We route them differently: reversible changes proceed on a notification, irreversible ones require explicit sign-off.
When the approval trail lives in the same place as the work, "who approved this" stops being a conversation. It becomes a link. That single change eliminates most of the friction that makes people slow to approve in the first place — they are no longer worried about being blamed for something they do not remember agreeing to.
Send the shape of what you are carrying — how many accounts, which channels, where it hurts. We will come back with specifics.