A journalist contacts an agency at eleven in the morning wanting a comment by one for a piece running that afternoon. The agency drafts three sentences in twenty minutes.
The quote goes to a marketing manager, who forwards it to a director, who wants legal to see it. At four o'clock the approval arrives. The piece ran at two with a competitor quoted instead.
1. Agree the approver at the start of the relationship
Named, with a deputy. Not a department. An approval route without a named person is an approval route that fails on the first urgent day.
2. Separate planned from reactive approval
Planned material can take a week. Reactive comment cannot, and the same process applied to both guarantees the reactive opportunities are lost.
3. Set a reactive deadline everybody accepts
Two hours, or whatever the sector requires. The client agreeing to that in advance is what makes the opportunity available at all.
4. Build pre approved messaging
Agreed positions on the topics that recur in the sector, signed off once. An agency can then respond immediately within an agreed boundary.
5. Establish what needs legal review and what does not
Most comment does not. Sending everything to legal by default is how organisations lose every reactive opportunity they are offered.
6. Agree a no comment position too
Topics where the client will not speak. Knowing this in advance means an agency can decline immediately rather than chase an approval that was never coming.
7. Put a limit on rounds of amendment
Two, then it goes. Endless refinement of a quote is where material dies, and a stated limit is accepted readily when explained.
8. Explain what happens to the quality
Every round of committee editing makes a quote less usable and less likely to be published. Clients need to hear this plainly.
9. Set the escalation path
Who to contact when the approver is unavailable, and who can decide in their absence. Holidays and meetings should not cost coverage.
10. Record what was approved
The final version, who approved it and when. This matters enormously if a quote is later disputed.
11. Agree who speaks to journalists directly
Whether the agency can offer an interview, and who the spokesperson is. Approval on a live interview is not possible and the boundaries must be set beforehand.
12. Handle the crisis process separately
Crisis approval needs a different structure entirely, agreed before anything happens rather than during it.
13. Keep the expectations realistic from the start
Clients with slow approval get less coverage, and saying so at the outset is part of the conversation described in media coverage expectation questions in first conversations.
14. Apply the same discipline to owned content
Brand voice and approval questions overlap, as covered in content approval and brand voice questions.
15. Match the process to the engagement
A project has a defined approval need and a retainer needs a standing one, which is the distinction in retainer versus project enquiries.
16. Know what should never be answered automatically
Media requests and anything reputational need a person, which is the boundary described in questions your assistant should refuse. An assistant can still take a journalist's deadline and topic and escalate it immediately, which is what turns an eleven o'clock request into a one o'clock quote. See features, start at try, and the sector view sits under marketing agencies.