Why creative approvals stall, and how to keep work moving
Deliverables sit in review because nobody can say who they wait on, since when, or by what date. Five causes of review limbo and the fixes for each.
· 6 min read · Client delivery
Creative approvals stall when nobody can answer four questions about a deliverable in review: who it is waiting on, since when, for which decision, and by what date. If any one of those has no answer, the work is in limbo. It will stay there until somebody chases, and chasing is the most expensive way to move work there is.
Most agencies treat a slow approval as a client problem. Usually it is a process with a gap in it, and the client is simply the person standing nearest the gap.
The gap has a price. Cway's 2026 benchmark of packaging artwork approvals found email-run approval cycles averaged 32 days against 18 in structured workflows, and it listed unclear final approval ownership among the leading causes of delay (Cway, 2026). That is packaging rather than agency brand work, and the sample size is not published, so treat it as a direction more than a number. Anyone who has chased a sign-off will recognise the direction.
The four-question test
Before fixing anything, run the test on whatever is in review right now. For each deliverable, write down:
- Who it is waiting on, by name.
- The date it started waiting.
- The decision needed: approve, request changes, or answer a question.
- The date that decision is due.
A deliverable with four answers is moving, even if it is moving slowly. A deliverable with a blank is in limbo, and the blank tells you which of the causes below you are looking at.
Cause one: nobody is named
"Waiting on the client" is where most limbo starts. A client is a company, and a company cannot open a link. When the review went to five people on a thread, each of them can reasonably assume one of the other four has it.
The fix is to send every review to named people with a role each. Reviewers comment. Approvers decide. Most stakeholders should be reviewers, and there should be as few approvers as the client can live with. The detail of setting that up with a client, and recording the decision, is in a client approval workflow that holds up.
Cause two: approvers in a queue
Some reviews do name their approvers, then line them up one behind another. The brand manager signs, then the marketing director, then legal. Each handover is a new wait, and a two-day holiday at step two stops the whole chain.
Run approvers in parallel unless the order genuinely matters. Legal often does need to see the final version. The brand manager and the marketing director usually do not need to take turns. Where a sequence is real, make the current step visible, so everyone can see the review is sitting with the second approver, and has been since Tuesday.
Cause three: feedback that never becomes a decision
A reviewer leaves six comments and goes quiet. From their side, they have done their part. From yours, nothing has been decided: you do not know whether the comments are all of it, whether they want to see a revision first, or whether they are waiting on a colleague.
This one hides well, because the review looks active. Close it by asking for an explicit end state every time. A reviewer either marks their feedback complete, approves, or requests changes. Comments on their own are input and never an outcome. How to run the comments themselves, including what to do when two reviewers contradict each other, is in how to handle client feedback on design work.
Cause four: the notice went somewhere nobody looks
The review link went out in an email on Friday at 5pm. It is now under forty newer emails, filtered into a folder, or sitting with somebody who left the company in July. Everyone involved believes the ball is in someone else's court.
Two habits fix most of this. Send review requests to the people named in cause one, never to a shared inbox or a distribution list. And give the client one place where everything waiting on them is listed, so a missed email is not the only thread tying them to the work. The wider case against running client work through email is in stop running client work from your inbox.
Cause five: there is no date
A review without a due date will be done when it is convenient, which for a busy client is after everything that has a date. Asking nicely does not change that ordering. A date does.
Put a decision date on every review when it is sent, and make it visible to both sides. When the date passes, follow up once, with the specific question and the consequence: "we need a decision on the homepage by Thursday to hold the launch on the 30th." That sentence gets answered. "Any thoughts on the designs?" gets read and parked. Dates the client can see carry more weight than dates in your project plan, which is the argument of landing dates, not deadlines.
The studio has a limbo too
It is worth running the four-question test on your own side. Feedback arrives on Monday, and the revision sits unassigned until Wednesday, because nobody decided who would pick it up. From the client's side that looks exactly like the delays they get blamed for.
The same answers apply in reverse. Every returned review needs a named owner in the studio, a date for the next version, and a place the client can see both.
Questions agencies ask about stalled approvals
How long should a client take to approve design work?
Agree it before the first review goes out. Two to three working days per round is a reasonable default for most brand and marketing deliverables. What matters more is that the date is written on the review and visible to the client, since an unwritten expectation cannot be missed.
Is it acceptable to treat silence as approval?
Only if the client agreed to it in the contract, and even then use it sparingly. A deemed approval that surprises the client costs more goodwill than the delay it avoided. An escalation rule works better: if a review passes its date, it goes to the client's named owner with the launch date attached.
How do you chase an approval without annoying the client?
Chase once, late enough to be fair, with a specific question and a specific consequence. Repeated "just checking in" messages train clients to ignore you. One message that names the decision, the date and what slips if it is missed usually gets a reply the same day.
Where HoopoeHQ fits
HoopoeHQ answers the four questions on screen. Every deliverable in review lives in the client's own workspace with its approvers named, and My feedback lists what is waiting on each person, including the client, so nothing depends on an email being found. Reviewers mark feedback complete or approve on the review itself, and every request carries a landing date both sides can see. The detail is on the reviews page.
If you have a deliverable that has been "with the client" for two weeks and nobody can say with whom, start a 14-day trial and put the next one somewhere it cannot hide.