Upgrade your Ad Approval Process: every marketer needs a procedure not only for approving and organizing ads, but also for tracking the process and archiving the finished product for review by auditors.

• Author: Tonioli, Jason

IT'S 5 P.M. The closed-door meeting continues interminably, and you've been waiting outside in the hallway.

In your hands is the final copy of a print ad that was sent to get approved by your manager, but that hasn't happened. This is your attempt to get it done. An entire team of marketing professionals stands by upstairs awaiting your signal to proceed with the printing of the ad. The only person who can sign off on it is behind closed doors in a meeting. Every second that passes is valuable productivity being wasted.

The doors suddenly open, and you try to reach your manager and seize upon the chance to get his official approval for the ad.

To your dismay, he takes the ad and says, "I'm a little busy at the moment. I won't be able to get this back to you until next week." Speechless, you stand there as he casually tucks the paper into the bottom of a briefcase and hurries through the door.

The bank marketing industry is full of challenges, and compliance is one of its toughest hurdles. If Merriam-Webster included "bank ad approval process" in the dictionary, it might say something like: "A labyrinthine obstacle course of sprints, dead-ends, and crashes maneuverable only by the most aggressive and organized of professionals."

While every bank has a procedure in place for approving and organizing ads, the reality is that people get busy, and marketing's priorities are not always in alignment with those of other bank departments, as demonstrated in the narrative above. Amid increasingly stringent compliance regulations, marketers need to address questions dealing with the efficiency of bank marketing campaigns:

* How do you accelerate the approval process for ads without taking away from the extreme level of focus and time needed for compliance personnel to authorize them?

* How do you allow marketing to apply corrections in time to meet deadlines?

* How should marketing managers keep track of all the decision-making correspondence culminating in an ad's final approval?

* Once an ad goes live, how does marketing measure how efficiently it all went?

Streamlining approval

Ideally, a good marketing department anticipates lag time by setting the clock early: It seeks approval for ads well before they are due to print. This proactive procedure not only accommodates lag time, it insulates the team from drastic letdowns or last-minute mistakes, thereby eliminating hiccups on the road to an ad going live. As the campaign progresses, correspondence regarding the ad's approval is filed either electronically or placed in the famous black binder kept by most bank marketers. The ad is revised and finalized before going live.

While this scenario may play out in a perfect world, the fact is that in the real...