Brands are losing ‘Decision Velocity.’ Is the bottleneck slowing down your marketing actually…. you?

There’s a conversation that has taken place in many a marketing agency and internal marketing team across the land.

It usually happens a few weeks after a campaign has finally gone live – possibly slightly later than planned, usually a little diluted, and somehow managing to miss the moment it was built for.

Someone in the room asks: “Where did the time go?” And everyone shifts uncomfortably, because they all know the answer. The client brief was clear. The strategy was sound and agreed. The creative idea was exciting, and production was robust. What killed it was the approval chain. Or rather, the absence of one.

This is the bottleneck nobody likes to talk about. Not because it’s hard to fix, but because acknowledging it requires prickly conversations about ownership, authority, and trust. It’s less painful to blame the timeline or the production. But in my experience, the real drag on marketing velocity is almost never the work. It’s the invisible friction sitting between the work and the world.

The approval maze no one drew a map for.

Most organisations and marketing teams have an approval process of sorts. The problem is that sometimes it exists in someone’s head rather than on paper (and it changes depending on who’s in the building that week).

Genuinely excellent campaigns can crawl through multiple rounds of feedback from stakeholders who were never part of the original briefing — each one adding a comment, a caveat, a new direction — until, unfortunately, the work that emerges doesn’t really resemble what was originally conceived.

The deeper problem, as I see it, lies not in a lack of ideas or tools, but in unclear ownership, siloed teams, and decision processes that are either too slow or too fragmented. When marketing is constantly waiting for input, chasing approvals, or navigating silos, its impact is fundamentally limited.

And the numbers don’t lie. In fact, they are quite alarming.

Only 8% of B2B marketers are able to claim that a vast majority of their projects move along efficiently.

That’s a staggering figure. It means that the overwhelming majority of marketing organisations are operating in a near-permanent state of friction, where the process itself is dismantling the potential of the work.

The cultural moment you missed while stuck in a meeting.

Planned campaigns are one thing. But reactive marketing is where approval chaos becomes genuinely costly.

Culture moves fast. A conversation can catch fire online in the time it takes to get three stakeholders on a call.

Brands that have a rightful, credible place in those moments have a narrow window. Miss it, and you haven’t just lost a piece of earned media. You’ve possibly signalled to your audience that you’re a brand that watches, rather than participates.

The world outside our walls won’t wait. Trends happen in the quickest of moments. Competitors copy and outpace. And the more complex your organisation, the more these bottlenecks compound.

Speed isn’t recklessness: it’s a commercial imperative.

There’s almost certainly a version of this conversation where someone pushes back and says that rigorous approval processes exist for good reason. They protect the brand. They prevent mistakes. They maintain legal and regulatory compliance. And that’s all true. But “Decision Velocity” isn’t about recklessness. It’s about clarity.

The difference between a slow approval process and a fast one is rarely about the number of people involved. It’s about knowing, in advance, who those people are, what they’re responsible for reviewing, and how long they have to do it.

Clear RACI frameworks – defining who is Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed – for every campaign or piece of comms, combined with agreed SLAs at each step, are what separate marketing teams that move at pace from those that don’t.

And the commercial stakes here are not insignificant. found that brands that get to market faster than competitors see meaningfully greater revenue growth, and that advantage compounds over time. Meanwhile, even the most digitally sophisticated marketing organisations have experienced revenue uplifts of by shifting to more agile, cross-functional operating models where decision-making authority sits closer to the work.

The cost of being slow is not abstract. It is measurable in missed revenue, missed moments, and the slow erosion of team morale that comes from watching good work die in a drawer.

The conversation that needs to happen at the start, not the end.

The conversation about decision-making – who owns what, who has final sign-off, what constitutes an emergency escalation and who handles it – needs to happen before a single brief is written.

When strategic and creative partners come together with their clients at the start of a relationship, or at the start of a new campaign, there is a tendency to rush to the exciting parts; the strategy, the big idea, the media plan etc. The governance conversation feels administrative, dry and unsexy. And so, it often gets deferred, or worse, not handled at all. And everyone pays for it later.

The goal is not to centralise control, but to reduce friction.

When everyone knows what they are responsible for and how the project and work should be tracked, execution becomes faster and more confident. A decision framework, agreed upfront, is not a constraint on creativity. It is the structure that allows creativity to reach the world at speed.

This means agreeing explicitly on things that feel almost too obvious to state.

• Who is the single decision-maker on strategic direction and creative work?
• What happens if that person is unavailable?
• Which stakeholders are consulted, and which are informed after the fact?
• How long does each stage of review take?
• What is the process for time-sensitive reactive work, where the standard timeline doesn’t apply?

These conversations are not glamorous. But, in my experience, they are the difference between work and campaigns that get out of the building, and those that linger.

Agencies need to lead this: stop waiting to be asked.

As strategic and creative partners, we spend a great deal of energy on the quality of our thinking and the craft of our output. We invest in strategy, in creative, in planning, in production. And then sometimes (increasingly more), work is handed over to clients and their own process.  What happens then? That depends on the client, but agencies are sometimes left wondering why the work takes so long to come out the other side.

Isn’t that the client’s problem? No, it’s not.

As agencies, we need to stop treating governance as ‘the client’s problem’. It is our problem too, because it determines whether the work we care so much about actually reaches the real world and audience it was made for.

The best partners will not wait be invited into that conversation. They will bring the framework with them. They’ll arrive at the first briefing with a proposed decision structure, a suggested RACI, a clear point of view on how the approval process should work, and they advocate for it.

Some may see this as overstepping, but not me! This is what a genuine, strategic and creative partnership looks like. A client who trusts their partner enough to work collaboratively on decision-making is a client whose campaigns will move faster, perform better, and be more reactive when culture gives them an opening.

As client partners, we have both the perspective and the incentive to help solve it. We see across multiple clients, multiple categories, and multiple ways of working. We know what good and fast looks like, and we know what gets in the way.

It’s time more agencies started using that knowledge more assertively. Not to take control, but to remove the barriers that stop great work from doing what great work is supposed to do: get out into the world, on time, earn its place there and deliver results for our clients.

If you need more ‘decision velocity’, contact us today, or connect directly with our Strategy Director, Mark Brighton on LinkedIn or email.