Notes for owners · Branding and communication
How to review advertising creative without wrecking it
You are approving a PDF at full zoom on a laptop. Your customer will see it at forty metres, or on a muted phone, for three seconds. Every useful review starts by closing that gap.
The GullySales team · Updated 21 Sept 2026 · 7 min read
Most advertising is reviewed in the wrong conditions. The owner opens a PDF on a laptop, zooms to fill the screen, reads every word carefully in a quiet room, and approves or rejects it. The customer will see the same artwork from a car at fifty kilometres an hour, or on a muted phone between two messages, or for four seconds at the breakfast table. A review that does not simulate those conditions is a review of a document, not of an advertisement.
Look at it the way the buyer will
This takes ten minutes and catches more than any amount of discussion.
| Medium | How to review it |
|---|---|
| Hoarding | Print at A4, stick it on the wall, walk fifteen metres back, look for three seconds and turn away. Say what you remember |
| Newspaper | Print at actual size in black and white, hold it at arm's length at a table |
| Bus rear panel | Look at it on a phone screen at arm's length. That is roughly the angle and the size a driver behind gets |
| Short video | Watch on a phone, muted, with the volume genuinely off, and stop after two seconds |
| Radio script | Have somebody read it aloud in a car with a window open, once, at the speed a station reads |
| Cinema | Watch it on the largest screen you can find, at show volume |
| Search advertisement | Read it in a list of four competitors' advertisements, not on its own |
The pattern behind all of them is the same. Reduce, distance, shorten and remove sound, because that is what real conditions do.
Separate the three kinds of comment before you send anything
Facts. The phone number, the offer dates, the price and whether it includes GST, the address, the registration or licence number your trade has to carry, the spelling of a person's name. These are not opinions and they are not negotiable. Somebody has to dial the number and check the dates against the release order.
Brief misses. The advertisement is for the wrong buyer, leads with the wrong offer, or has no response route. These are also not negotiable, though they are much more expensive if they come up in round two rather than at the concept stage.
Preferences. Colour, photograph choice, how big the logo is. These are real and you are allowed to have them. They also cost a day each, and past a certain point they will flatten the work into something safe.
The comments that are not review comments
"Make the logo bigger" is the most requested change in Indian advertising and almost never the right one. Your logo is not what a stranger is looking for. The offer is.
"Add this as well" is the second. Every extra message shrinks all the others, until an eight-column strip is carrying four things and communicating none of them.
And then the brother-in-law who saw the artwork on a phone over dinner and has views. Their opinion is worth exactly as much as yours, which is to say it predicts very little about what strangers will do. Say the uncomfortable part out loud in your own office: this is not a decision about what we like.
Send one list, once
A good comment names the item, says what is wrong, and says what it should be instead. "Rear panel: the number printed is the showroom landline, and the release order says the campaign number. Replace it with the campaign number." That is actionable. "Something feels off about the bottom half" is not.
Send the whole list in one message, from one person, with the fact corrections marked as must-fix and the rest marked as requests. Four separate WhatsApp messages over two days to three different people at the agency is how the wrong version reaches the printer.
For example, a showroom owner approves a hoarding on a laptop, satisfied because he read the phone number clearly at full zoom. On site the number sits under the tree line, in type too small for the flyover approach, and he has paid for a month of a sign that cannot be acted on. Fifteen metres and a printed A4 sheet would have found it.
The deadline is the real constraint
Print, outdoor, cinema and television have no undo. Once the release order has gone to the publication, the vinyl is at the depot or the file is with the cinema, a change means paying for the item twice. Digital advertising is the opposite: a headline can be swapped at eleven at night and the money follows the better version by the weekend.
So spend your review attention where the cost of being wrong is highest. One careful pass on the hoarding artwork, and a lighter, faster loop on the search and feed copy, where being wrong for a day is cheap and testing beats arguing. That testing is its own discipline, covered in our post on testing advertising creative.
The check that applies to everything
- Dial the number on the artwork from a handset nobody at the office recognises, and time how long it takes to be answered.
- Read the dates against the release order and the material deadline.
- Confirm the file matches the medium's specification, in size, resolution and colour, before it leaves.
- Have somebody who reads the language proof the language version, including the numbers.
- Ask one person who knows nothing about the campaign what they think is being sold. Give them the same time the medium gives.
What to do next
Write down, today, who approves creative in your business and who is allowed to comment. One name in each row. Then agree with your agency how many rounds are included and when the release deadline falls for each medium.
Creative and graphic design covers the artwork and the adaptations, and campaign governance covers the approval trail across a campaign running in several media at once. The free audit is where we check the part that decides whether any of it mattered, which is what happens to the enquiry when it arrives.