Creative Approval Workflow Template for Agencies and Brand Teams
The five stage approval template I run in my agency, with an owner, a turnaround window and exit criteria for every stage, and how each one becomes a PlayPause status and Playbook checklist.
These days, when a client's marketing manager messages my account team to ask where the launch cut is, nobody has to open Gmail and go digging, right, because the answer is already sitting on the card in PlayPause. The card says Client Review, and everyone on my side already knows from the brief which one person's yes we're waiting on, which is the visible end of a creative approval workflow template that took me far too long to write down.
Before it, approval lived in whichever thread had the latest reply, so a junior coordinator would thumbs up a cut on Friday, the editor would start the cutdowns on Monday, and on Wednesday the head of brand would watch it for the first time, right, and reopen the voiceover. Everyone in that chain believed they were following the process, because the process only existed in my account lead's head. What we didn't have was an owner, a deadline and an exit condition written against each stage, which, to be very honest, is the only part of a template that changes behaviour.
So what follows is the template itself, with an owner, a turnaround window and exit criteria for each of five stages, and then how I turn it into custom statuses and a Playbook checklist inside PlayPause.
What a creative approval workflow template needs to include
Most templates that come up for this search give you a neat row of stage names and stop there, and I'm pretty sure that's why so many teams fill one in for a single project and quietly drift back to email. A stage name on its own tells nobody what to do on a Tuesday afternoon, right, so the real work sits in the four fields you attach to each stage.
The first is the status name, written exactly as it will appear on the card, because if the template says Client Review and the tool says With Client, people invent a third name within a month. The second is one owner, a person rather than a department, who moves the job forward and gets asked when it stalls. The third is a turnaround window, which is basically the agreed point where the owner is allowed to chase. The fourth, which almost every downloadable template skips, is the exit criteria, meaning the checkable things that must be true before work leaves the stage, and for stage one they come straight out of a proper creative brief, the objective, the audience, the mandatories, the deliverables and so on.
A stage without exit criteria is just a label on a card, and a label has never once stopped a client from reopening the script in round three.
An approval with nothing written against it gets reopened the moment somebody senior sees the work, which is why the exit criteria are the field that actually saves you money. For the wider review setup, I've covered setting up a video approval workflow in a separate post.
The five stage template you can copy
Here's the template exactly as I keep it. Copy it into a doc, swap the brackets for your own project, and change the turnaround windows to whatever your contracts say, because mine are defaults tuned for short brand videos, right, not laws of nature.
CREATIVE APPROVAL WORKFLOW TEMPLATE
Project: [client], [deliverable], [runtime]
Final approver: [one name and job title]
Rounds in scope: [number]
STAGE 1 Status: Brief Locked
Owner: account lead
Turnaround: client confirms within 1 working day
Exit when: objective, audience, deliverables, mandatories, final approver and round count are written down and the client has replied "confirmed"
STAGE 2 Status: Internal Review
Owner: creative lead
Turnaround: same working day as the export
Exit when: every item on the folder playbook checklist is ticked
STAGE 3 Status: Client Review
Owner: the named final approver
Turnaround: 2 working days per round
Exit when: all notes sit on frames in one consolidated round, or the approver writes "approved" against this exact version
STAGE 4 Status: Changes Requested
Owner: editor
Turnaround: 1 to 2 working days
Exit when: every comment has a reply and the new version is stacked on the same card, then back to Internal Review
STAGE 5 Status: Approved
Owner: account lead
Turnaround: same day as the written approval
Exit when: version name, approver, date and deliverables are recorded and masters go out
Say the job is a 60 second brand film for a meal kit company plus three 15 second cutdowns, with two rounds in the SOW. On Monday the client's marketing manager confirms the brief and names herself as final approver, and the card moves to Brief Locked. On Thursday the editor exports MV1, and the creative lead catches a lower third at 00:00:41 that still carries the old product name, gets it fixed, and only then moves the card to Client Review. The marketing manager leaves her notes on frames by Monday evening, including a circle drawn round a logo lockup that sits too close to the edge at 00:00:14, and MV2 lands on the same card two days later. She approves MV2 in writing and the cutdowns start from a cut that is actually locked, which, you see what I mean here, is the whole reason the stages run in this order.
Who owns each approval stage
Naming one person per stage feels rude when three people on the client side clearly care about the video, and that awkwardness is exactly where most agency creative approval steps fall apart. The catch here is that plenty of people can have opinions on a stage, and the owner is simply the one person allowed to say it's done. The stage that fails most often is client review, right, because the named approver quietly turns out not to be the real decision maker.
So Brief Locked has one question my account leads never skip, which is whether anyone above the approver will want to see this video before it goes live, and it's a very very cheap question on a Monday compared with a reopened voiceover in week three. If that's the founder, the founder either becomes the approver or watches in round one and not after, and legal gets its own slot before the final round. When several people do need to comment, they all use the same link in the same round, which is basically how we run multi-stakeholder video review in PlayPause, with @mentions pulling the right person onto the exact frame.
When a turnaround window runs out
A window only helps if something happens when it closes, so my account leads follow this chase routine on Client Review. When the two working days are up, the account lead sends one short message with the same share link and one specific question, for instance whether the logo note at 00:00:14 is the only thing blocking approval, because a vague nudge just invites a fresh round of opinions. If another working day passes, the account lead goes to whoever signed the SOW, and the slipped days get added to the delivery date in writing, right, so the delay sits on the record instead of quietly becoming the editor's weekend.
Turning the template into custom statuses
A template in a document is a good intention, right, and the version that actually gets followed lives on the card the editor is already looking at, so on any new workspace I first create five custom statuses with exactly the names above. Custom statuses are on every plan, and because every card carries one, anyone scanning the project can spot the card that has sat in Internal Review since yesterday morning.
PlayPause has four roles, Owner, Admin, Manager and Editor, and the team rule we agree on is that editors move a card as far as Internal Review while only a Manager or above moves it to Client Review or Approved, because those are the moves a client sees. The review itself happens on one share link that the client opens in a browser without creating an account, clicking the frame to comment or draw on it. Each new version stacks on the same card, so MV1, MV2 and MV3 sit together instead of scattering across three emails. Sensitive jobs get a password on the link, and every comment can post into a Slack channel so the account lead knows a round has started.
Who-watched analytics makes the exits checkable rather than taken on trust, showing who opened the link, when and from which city, so I know whether an approver actually watched MV2 before calling it fine. On Agency and up, side-by-side version compare lets the creative lead check MV2 against MV3 and confirm that only the requested changes went in. Our approval workflow features page covers the status side, and the client approval workflow page shows what the approver sees when they open the link.
Nobody moves a card to Approved until the named approver has said so in writing on that exact version, and a thumbs up on the previous cut doesn't count.
Storing the approval workflow checklist in a Playbook
Internal Review protects the client from your mistakes, and it only works if the reviewer checks the same things every time, which is why my approval workflow checklist lives in a Playbook rather than in somebody's head. Playbooks are on the Agency plan and above, and each client gets their own, with a brand playbook for the permanent brand management rules like the logo safe area and the legal line, and a folder playbook for this job's instructions, including the checklist.
- Supers and lower thirds match the product names in the brief
- Logo lockup and end card follow the brand playbook
- Captions checked against the approved script
- Every cutdown exported in the ratios the brief lists
- All comments from the last round have a reply
The detail that makes it work is that a Playbook checklist isn't done until every item is ticked, so nobody can wave a cut through with three of five boxes checked, right, and a promise to look at captions later. We explained the thinking in our post introducing checklists. I also share the Playbook as a clean no-login page before round one, so the client sees the exit criteria before they see the cut, and trust me on any level, a client who has read the checklist gives far better notes.
Adapting the template for brand teams versus agencies
The five stages hold in both worlds, but the owners and the pressure points move around. In an agency the final approver sits outside the building, right, and the rounds are counted against an SOW, so Brief Locked exists to stop scope creep early and the card's comment history settles which round you're in when a third one gets requested. Agencies should also watch how long the approval record stays reachable, since share links last 30 days on Creator, 90 days on Agency and never expire on Enterprise. Enterprise also adds white-label branding and a custom share domain such as review.yourbrand.com, which matters when the client should see your agency's name on the review page.
external final approver, rounds counted against the SOW, account lead sends the share link and records the approval
internal approvers from brand, legal and product, outside agencies supply the cuts, brand manager holds the final call
On an in-house brand team it flips, because the approvers are colleagues and the cuts often come from outside agencies. I'd rename Client Review to Stakeholder Review, add a Legal Review status before it when claims are involved, and use guest version upload on Agency and up so the outside agency can put MV2 on the card without an account. Intake is its own problem, covered in the post on in-house video team workflow, and the brand video production process post fits around this template from brief to launch. Weekly ad testing runs the performance creative production workflow in hours rather than days, and TV spots need a clearance stage before Approved, as the Clearcast approval process piece explains. At the end of the day the stages stay put and the owners and windows are what you tune, does that make sense, right?
Frequently asked questions
How many stages should a creative approval process have?
Five is the number I'd start with, brief, internal review, client review, changes and approval, because each one has a different owner and a different thing being decided. You can add a Legal Review or clearance stage when claims or broadcast are involved, but I'd resist going past seven, right, since every extra stage is another place for a card to sit without anybody feeling responsible for moving it along.
What should go on an approval workflow checklist?
Anything a reviewer could forget and a client would definitely notice, for instance product names in supers, the logo lockup, captions against the approved script, the export ratios on the brief, and whether every note from the last round got a reply. Keep it to five or six items per stage, and store it in a folder playbook next to the video so it gets ticked on every cut rather than remembered on some of them.
How long should each approval stage take?
My defaults for short brand videos are one working day for the brief confirmation, the same day for internal review, two working days for each client round and one to two days for changes. Longer films need longer client windows and weekly ad tests need shorter ones. The number matters less than writing it into the brief, so the account lead has an agreed point to chase instead of a vague feeling that the client has gone quiet.
Which PlayPause plan do I need to run this template?
Custom statuses, roles, share links, version stacks, who-watched analytics and client comments without an account all come with Creator, the entry plan at $9 a month. Playbooks, side-by-side compare and guest version upload need the Agency plan at $19 a month or $199 a year, which is the one I'd pick for this template, with 50 members, 250 GB and Unlimited projects, while Enterprise adds white-label and the custom share domain.
If you want to try it on real work, every plan on our PlayPause pricing page starts with a 7-day free trial. That's enough time to create the five statuses, write your first folder playbook checklist and push one real video through all five stages before deciding whether it earns a place in your week.
So yeah. That's my way of saying it.
Saumyajit co-founded PlayPause after years watching review and approval quietly eat creative teams' deadlines. He writes about the workflow side of video, feedback, versioning, and getting to a clean sign-off.
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