--- title: "Business Case: How to Cut Campaign Approval Time" description: A fictional retailer runs the numbers on 34 days from briefing to launch — and three levers that recover half of the annual cost. image: https://blog.noreja.com/hubfs/blog/featured-images/2026-10-13-business-case-campaign-approvals.png --- [Skip to content](https://blog.noreja.com/en/cut-campaign-approval-time#main-content) ![](https://blog.noreja.com/hs-fs/hubfs/blog/featured-images/2026-10-13-business-case-campaign-approvals.png?width=1820&height=1024&name=2026-10-13-business-case-campaign-approvals.png) GenAI BPM Process Intelligence # Business Case: How to Cut Campaign Approval Time ![Lukas Pfahlsberger](https://app.hubspot.com/settings/avatar/6b6ceb34347ba3ac2667e67af4e9f63f) Lukas Pfahlsberger October 13, 2026 ## Why Campaign Approvals Deserve the Attention Now Welcome to this edition of Business Case, the format in which we take a realistic company, put numbers on a process problem, and calculate what doing nothing costs. Marketing is one of the few functions where a delay has a hard deadline attached. A campaign that ships two weeks late does not simply arrive later — it arrives after the season started, after the competitor's promotion, after the moment it was designed for. And yet the internal path from briefing to launch is rarely treated as a process worth measuring. It runs through a campaign tool, a shared drive, several email threads and a budget approval that nobody can quite predict. That combination — a hard external clock and an unmeasured internal path — is where money quietly disappears. This edition looks at a fictional but realistic retailer, quantifies where its campaign and budget approvals fail, and sizes both the cost of inaction and the return of three concrete levers. ## A Retailer Whose Campaigns Keep Arriving Late Nordkette Living GmbH, headquartered in Hamburg, sells furniture and home accessories through 68 stores and an online shop. The company has 1,200 employees and annual revenue of 310 million euros. Marketing runs about 140 campaigns a year — seasonal pushes, store promotions, online activations — on a media budget of 9.3 million euros, with a team of 22 people at a fully loaded cost of 78,000 euros each, or 1.72 million euros a year. The relevant numbers look like this. From briefing to launch, a campaign takes 34 days on average, against a peer benchmark of around 18 for comparable retailers. Each campaign passes through 4.2 approval loops before it is signed off, where two would be normal. Forty-one percent of campaigns miss their planned start date. Nobody in the company would describe marketing as slow — the team is visibly busy, and every campaign eventually ships. That is precisely what makes this expensive. The delay is not a visible failure; it is the accumulated result of a process where approval criteria live in people's heads, budget sign-off happens whenever the approver has time, and every unclear point produces another loop. ## Where the Approval Process Fails — and What It Costs **Problem one: approval criteria are discovered, not defined.** A campaign concept goes to the head of marketing, comes back with a comment on tone, goes to the category lead, comes back with a question about the assortment shown, goes to finance, comes back with a question about the media split. Each round is reasonable in isolation; together they mean the team learns what the approvers want by iterating rather than by knowing in advance. Those 2.2 excess loops per campaign cost around 3.5 hours each in preparation, rework and meeting time across everyone involved. Across 140 campaigns at 55 euros per hour, that is roughly 59,000 euros a year in internal effort. **Problem two: late sign-off makes media buying more expensive.** When budget approval lands close to the launch date, the media booking becomes short notice. Placements that could have been secured weeks earlier are bought at a premium, and the best inventory is gone. Counting conservatively — 20 campaigns a year affected, an average campaign budget of 25,000 euros, and a 12 percent short-notice surcharge — that is about 60,000 euros of pure timing cost, paying more for exactly the same reach. **Problem three: seasonal campaigns lose their best days.** This is the largest and least visible item. Twelve of Nordkette's campaigns are tied to a season or an event, and when those start late they do not run longer at the end — the season ends regardless. Six lost advertising days per seasonal campaign, at 3,000 euros of contribution margin per day, comes to about 216,000 euros a year of margin that was planned for and never earned. **The total cost of doing nothing: roughly 335,000 euros a year** — 59,000 in internal rework, 60,000 in short-notice media premiums, and 216,000 in lost seasonal margin. None of it appears as a line item anywhere, which is exactly why it persists. ## Faster Approvals in Practice: Three Levers **Lever one: define the approval criteria before the first draft.** Most approval loops exist because expectations were implicit. Writing them down changes that: a short criteria sheet per campaign type — mandatory brand elements, price and discount corridors, which claims need legal review, the media split range that needs no separate discussion — turns approval from a discovery exercise into a check. It also makes it possible to say what a first draft has to contain to be approvable, which is the single biggest lever on the number of loops. This is the same reasoning we applied to discount approvals in the business case on [stopping margin erosion in retail sales](https://blog.noreja.com/en/stop-margin-erosion-retail-sales?hsLang=en). **Lever two: measure the path from briefing to launch.** Nordkette knows how individual campaigns went; it does not know how its campaign process behaves. The data exists — the campaign tool records status changes, the ticket system records the requests, the media plan records booking dates, the mail archive records the approval requests. Joining those timestamps reconstructs the actual path and answers the questions that matter: in which state do campaigns wait longest, which approver is the constraint, how often does a campaign fall back to a previous stage, and which types run smoothly. Process mining does exactly this, and platforms such as [noreja](https://topai.tools/t/noreja) add the causal layer, which is what separates "approvals are slow" from "campaigns with an external agency wait an average of nine days at the budget step". The second sentence can be acted on. **Lever three: fixed approval windows instead of ad-hoc requests.** Much of the waiting is not decision time but queue time — a request sits until the approver happens to look. Two scheduled slots per week, with everything submitted by a cut-off decided in that slot, converts an unpredictable wait into a known one, usually shorter than the current average. Pair it with package approval for recurring campaign types and a named deputy for each approver, so absence does not stall the queue. The general mechanics of this — pricing each control and approving the pattern rather than the case — are covered in the edition on [when approvals cost more than they protect](https://blog.noreja.com/en/when-approvals-cost-more-than-they-protect?hsLang=en). **The projected impact, deliberately conservative.** Assume approval loops fall from 4.2 to 2.6 and time from briefing to launch from 34 to 22 days — still above the 18-day benchmark. Internal rework then drops by about 43,000 euros. Missed start dates fall from 41 to 22 percent, so short-notice media premiums apply to nine fewer campaigns, saving roughly 27,000 euros. And seasonal campaigns lose three instead of six advertising days, recovering about 108,000 euros of contribution margin. Total annual benefit: roughly 178,000 euros, a little over half of the identified cost. Against that, the investment: approximately 85,000 euros one-off for the criteria work, data integration and process analysis, plus 30,000 euros a year in platform and maintenance cost. Net annual benefit is therefore about 148,000 euros, and the one-off investment pays back in roughly seven months. Even if the seasonal margin effect were ignored entirely and only internal effort and media premiums counted, payback would still arrive inside two years. ## Food for Thought How many approval loops does an average campaign go through in your organisation — and does anyone track that number? What share of your campaigns launched on the date planned at briefing? Could your team state, before the first draft, exactly what a campaign must contain to be approved without comment? How much of your media budget was booked at short notice last year, and what did that timing cost? For your seasonal campaigns: what is one lost advertising day worth in contribution margin — and has anyone ever calculated it? ## Conclusion Nordkette does not have a marketing problem; it has an approval process that nobody measures and that quietly costs about 335,000 euros a year. The largest part of that is not internal effort but margin that was planned and never earned, because campaigns designed for a season arrived after it started. Written criteria, a measured path from briefing to launch, and fixed approval windows are enough to recover roughly half of it within a year, with payback in about seven months. The first step costs nothing: measure how long your campaigns actually wait, and where. We invite you to run the same calculation for your own campaign process — take your campaigns per year, the average number of approval loops, and the share that miss their planned start date, and put a margin figure on the lost days. If you would like a second pair of eyes on the numbers or the process behind them, we are happy to look at it with you. [Contact us](https://outlook.office365.com/book/Kennenlernen@noreja.com/?ismsaljsauthenabled=true) ## FAQ #### What does a slow campaign approval process actually cost? Three things: internal rework from repeated approval loops, short-notice premiums when media is booked late, and lost contribution margin when seasonal campaigns start after their window opened. In the example above — 140 campaigns a year, 4.2 approval loops, 41 percent missing their start date — those add up to roughly 335,000 euros annually, with the seasonal margin loss by far the largest share. #### Why do campaigns go through so many approval loops? Because the criteria are implicit. When brand requirements, discount corridors, claims that need legal review and acceptable media splits are not written down, the team discovers them by iterating. Each loop is individually reasonable and collectively expensive — and the fix is a short criteria sheet per campaign type, not more meetings. #### How does process mining apply to marketing approvals? The relevant timestamps already exist across the campaign tool, ticket system, media plan and mail archive. Joining them reconstructs the real path from briefing to launch, showing which stage holds campaigns longest, which approver is the constraint, and how often campaigns fall back a stage. That turns "approvals are slow" into a specific, addressable statement. #### What are fixed approval windows? Scheduled slots — for example two per week — in which everything submitted before a cut-off is decided. They replace an unpredictable wait with a known one, usually shorter than the current average, and they make absences visible in advance so a deputy can be named. Most of the waiting in approval processes is queue time, not decision time. #### How quickly does improving campaign approvals pay back? In the modelled case, a one-off investment of about 85,000 euros with 30,000 euros of annual running cost produces roughly 178,000 euros of annual benefit, giving payback in about seven months. Even counting only internal effort and media premiums and ignoring seasonal margin entirely, payback still arrives within two years. ## Share this post [mailto:https%3A%2F%2Fblog.noreja.com%2Fen%2Fcut-campaign-approval-time](mailto:https%3A%2F%2Fblog.noreja.com%2Fen%2Fcut-campaign-approval-time) ## Keep reading ### [![](https://blog.noreja.com/hs-fs/hubfs/blog/featured-images/.png-Aug-28-2026-07-39-57-5591-AM.png?width=1820&height=1024&name=.png-Aug-28-2026-07-39-57-5591-AM.png) Two-For-One GenAI BPM Two for One: When Approvals Cost More Than They Protect](https://blog.noreja.com/en/when-approvals-cost-more-than-they-protect?hsLang=en) ### [![](https://blog.noreja.com/hs-fs/hubfs/blog/featured-images/.png-4.png?width=1820&height=1024&name=.png-4.png) Quick Tips GenAI BPM Quick Tips: Turning Implicit Knowledge Into Process](https://blog.noreja.com/en/turn-implicit-knowledge-into-processes?hsLang=en) [![noreja\_logo\_white](https://blog.noreja.com/hs-fs/hubfs/noreja_logo_white.png?width=300&height=78&name=noreja_logo_white.png "noreja_logo_white")](https://blog.noreja.com/?hsLang=en) [Privacy Policy](https://noreja.com/en/privacy) · [Legal](https://noreja.com/en/imprint) · © 2026 Noreja. 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