Approval loops: five rounds to a yes, and how to need fewer
Published · 4 min read
The third round of changes usually opens with a line like “Could we make the logo a bit bigger?”. By then the creative has long been finished. The only open question is whether everyone involved has the same picture in their head.
This is not a one-off. The BetterIdeas Project, run by BetterBriefs with the IPA and the WFA and published in 2025, collected answers from more than 1,000 agency, marketer and in-house respondents in 54 countries. On average, it takes five rounds of creative development to get to a signed-off idea. In IPA research in the UK in 2007, it was three.
The study covers creative work in general, not just out-of-home. OOH adds one thing on top: a fixed date by which the printed posters must sit in the media owner’s warehouse. Every round that no longer fits comes straight out of the buffer before print.
1. The rounds eat the buffer before print
Ströer wants posters for its large billboards (Großfläche) in its warehouse at least five working days before posting starts, and city light posters ten working days before. According to Ströer direkt, printing and shipping add another five to six days. That is why it recommends three to four weeks of lead time. If creative work only starts with the booking, the arithmetic often leaves about a week for approval.
Five rounds do not fit into that week if each one needs a day for feedback. So the last round is not decided. It is waved through.
30-second test: Count backwards from the posting date: delivery, print, shipping. The date that is left is your approval deadline. Put it in the first email to the client, not the last.
2. Too many voices that do not decide
Only 23 percent of agencies and 56 percent of marketers in the study agree that the current approval process works well. Respondents describe it as inconsistent, slow, subjective and painful. Only 43 percent of agencies agree that the right people sign off on creative ideas.
In practice it looks like this: the product manager approves, then sales takes a look, then the managing director. Every voice opens a new round, and every round only applies to the version that person happened to see.
30-second test: At the briefing, ask who says yes at the end. If there is more than one name, agree which of them has the final word, and invite that person to the first presentation.
3. Taste instead of criteria
In the study, 89 percent of agencies and 84 percent of marketers agree that personal opinion has a big impact on decisions. Only 10 percent say ideas are always evaluated against clearly defined criteria.
With a poster, most criteria can actually be checked. Is the brand readable from a distance? Does the message survive a change of format? Does the contrast hold in daylight? These questions have answers that do not depend on anyone’s mood that day.
30-second test: Write three checkable criteria into the approval email, for example legibility, brand and format. Mark any feedback that touches none of them as a matter of taste and discuss it in one go.
4. The layout does not show what hangs outside
Many loops start because the client is asked to approve a flat layout and has to imagine the site around it. Everyone imagines a different one. The “bigger logo” from round three is often exactly that: a vague unease nobody can name, because nobody has seen the creative in its surroundings.
Show the creative where it will hang and the comments change. “Feels a bit small somehow” becomes “you can’t read the price from a distance”. That is a sentence you can work with.
30-second test: Next to the layout, show the client an image of the creative on the real site. Watch whether the kind of feedback changes.
5. Variants one after another instead of side by side
The classic loop sends one variant, waits for feedback and builds the next. Three variants mean three rounds. Show them at the same time and three rounds become one comparison, done within a single meeting.
30-second test: Bring two variants on the same site to your next presentation, side by side. Ask “Which of the two?” rather than “Do you like it?”.
Why a live simulation shortens the rounds
Most of these five points come down to the same thing. Everyone involved has to see the same thing at the same time, the way it will look on the street. With one mockup file per variant that is tedious, because every change means a new file and a new email.
In a live simulation you swap creative and site during the meeting and show variants side by side. Whatever is decided goes into the approval email as a JPG or MP4, with a “Preview” watermark if you like, so no draft slips through as a final approval. Several sites can be collected and shared as a PowerPoint, PDF or link. Whether approval then happens in one round still depends on the brief and on the people involved. The rounds that consist only of misunderstandings, though, go away.