Intake and triage
Every creative team has a front door, whether it admits it or not. A good one is a structured request form that captures the business objective, audience, deliverables with formats, markets, deadline, budget owner and mandatory elements, and sends back requests that lack them. Triage sorts requests into types with standard handling: a new campaign, an adaptation of existing work, a resize, a localisation, an urgent fix. In large organisations much of the volume is adaptation rather than invention, and that is the work AI absorbs first. Keep a service catalogue stating, for each request type, what the requester gets and how long it takes.
Routing and capacity
Once production is faster, capacity planning moves to the people who brief, review and approve. Route each request type to a named owner and a fixed approval path, and track reviewer workload the way studios once tracked designer hours. A request that needs legal review should be flagged at intake, not discovered at the end. Hold a little capacity back for urgent work and make the cost of urgency visible, or every request will arrive marked urgent. When queues form, look at which approval step they form in; that step is usually where the next investment belongs.
Service levels that mean something
Service levels turn a creative team from a favour bank into a service. Set them per request type: a resize within a day, a localisation set within a few days, a new campaign to an agreed plan. Measure from an approved brief to final approval rather than from the first email, and stop the clock while the team waits on the requester. Publish performance against the levels every month. The conversation then moves from why something is late to which step is slow, and that is the conversation that fixes things. Revisit the levels once AI changes what is realistic for each request type.
Metrics and tooling
A few measures tell you most of what you need. Cycle time shows speed. First-pass approval rate shows whether briefs and brand rules are clear. Revision rounds per asset show where review is struggling. On-time delivery shows whether service levels are honest. Cost per asset by request type shows where money goes. The share of produced assets never used exposes over-production, which rises sharply once making things is cheap. Tooling should capture these as a by-product of work, not through timesheets. The studio records roles, sign-off and an audit trail for every asset, so approval history exists without anyone retyping it into a tracker.
Updated 25 September 2026 · General information, not legal advice. Rules change, so check the current text with your legal team before relying on it.