One campaign, four weeks, every handoff

Google reviews most ads within one business day. Meta, LinkedIn and TikTok each say about 24 hours.

Now the other number. In Smartly's 2026 survey of more than 450 marketers, 41% said it takes three to four weeks to launch a digital campaign, from creating the assets to execution. Only 3.6% manage it in under a week.

The machine's part takes a day. For four marketers in ten, the part before it takes most of a month.

So why does it take so long to launch an ad campaign? The published surveys point at rounds of review and approval between people, not at the platforms. An idea now takes five rounds to sign off, and the two sides of that process rate it very differently.

The machine is the fast step

Figure 1

One campaign: what has been measured

Brief?

Idea5 rounds

Make?

Sign off?

Build?

Review1 day

Decide?

3 to 4 weeks, for 41%

Follow one campaign from the brief to the decision on its results. Seven stages, and at almost every arrow the work changes hands.

The question marks are honest: no published figure was found for how long a brief waits in a queue, or how long results wait for a decision. Anyone who has run a campaign can fill them in from memory.

The idea goes round five times

The BetterIdeas Project, run in 2025 with the two trade bodies for agencies and advertisers, asked 1,034 people in 54 countries how ideas get approved.

Its count: an idea typically takes five rounds to be signed off.

Each round is a trip out and a trip back. Five rounds is five of each.

The two sides see the same process differently

The same study asked marketers and agencies about the process they share.

Figure 2

Two sides of the same handoff

Share who agree

MarketersAgencies

Approval works well56%23%

Feedback is clear52%30%

Right people sign off62%43%

More than half of marketers say the approval process works well. Fewer than a quarter of agencies agree.

Neither side is the villain. Both admit the same weakness: 84% of marketers and 89% of agencies agree that personal opinion has a big impact on the decision. The process is the problem, and both sides are inside it.

The way back from sales is often not built

Some of a campaign's most useful information sits with the sales team: who the real buyers turn out to be.

In a 2025 survey of 534 B2B marketers by Pipeline360, 63% said their teams have no formal process for gathering that from sales.

That survey is about who the buyers are, not about sales results, and it is the nearest published measure. For many teams, the road back from sales is simply not built.

What sits around the media

The media is not the only bill, and it is not the biggest.

Figure 3

Media is under a third of the budget

Share of the marketing budget, 2025

Paid media30.6%

Technology22.4%

People21.9%

Agencies20.7%

In Gartner's 2025 survey of 402 marketing leaders, paid media was under a third of the marketing budget. Technology, people and agencies together came to 65%.

That is the whole marketing budget, not the cost of running ads. It still makes the point: the media is the smaller bill.

Why this caps the formula

The next three articles go through the formula part by part: quality, velocity, optimization. Each has the same ceiling, people's hours, and this series argues that the handoffs are where those hours go.

Research waits for a slot. A new version waits for a designer and a sign-off. A result waits for a meeting.

What AI changes

A faster stage would help a little. The larger change is that the stages stop waiting for each other, once one system carries the work from the brief to the result. The approvals that matter stay with a person. The rest does not sit in a queue.

A month of handoffs can become a loop that turns every day. That is the change the rest of this series describes.

What to do on Monday

1. Time one campaign. Take the last campaign that launched and write down two dates for every stage: when the work arrived and when it left.
2. Separate the work from the wait. For each stage, estimate the hours someone was actually working on it. The difference is the wait.
3. Count the handoffs. Mark every point where the work moved from one person, team or tool to another, and ask at each one what the receiver had to ask again.

A faster campaign is only half the gain. The other half is what the machine learns from each one, and that starts with what it is told to count. That is quality, and the next article.