Google's Ads Liaison, Ginny Marvin, has confirmed that some Demand Gen image ads are experiencing approval delays of several days - not the hours advertisers typically plan around. The issue is live and ongoing, and for any campaign tied to a product launch, a promotional window, or a seasonal moment, several days of limbo is not a rounding error. It is a meaningful loss of paid reach.
Demand Gen has become a serious channel for upper-funnel and mid-funnel work. It runs across YouTube, YouTube Shorts, Gmail, and Discover, and it gives advertisers access to visually rich placements that sit closer to social than traditional search. That value proposition only holds if your creative actually gets served. When approval queues stretch into days, the channel's reliability comes into question.
Why This Matters More Than a Temporary Glitch
Approval delays are easy to dismiss as an operational headache. They are rarely treated as a strategic problem. But consider the typical Demand Gen use case: a brand running awareness creative ahead of a product drop, a retailer pushing image ads timed to a bank holiday sale, or an agency launching a new client campaign to a tight brief. In each case, a multi-day review window is not just inconvenient - it means spend either doesn't go live in time or goes live mid-window, compressing results and distorting performance data.
The broader issue is that automated platforms have trained advertisers to expect speed. Smart Bidding adjusts in real time. Performance Max assets rotate continuously. The assumption built into most campaign plans is that once you upload creative, it will be reviewed quickly. Demand Gen image ads are now demonstrating that this assumption is fragile. When the bottleneck is on Google's side, there is no bidding strategy or budget adjustment that fixes it.
The Approval Process Is Not As Passive As It Looks
Most advertisers treat ad approval as a background task - something that happens while you move on to the next job. In practice, approval status is an active campaign variable. A Demand Gen campaign with image ads in review is a campaign running on incomplete creative, which means your asset mix is constrained, your audience signals may be narrower than intended, and your results during that window are not representative of the campaign's potential.
This is particularly relevant for Demand Gen because the format relies heavily on visual creative to differentiate placements. Video assets and image assets serve different inventory. If your image ads are held in review while video continues to serve, your campaign is de facto skewed toward video placements whether you planned for that or not. You may not notice this in the dashboard unless you are actively monitoring asset-level delivery.
How to Build Approval Delays Into Your Campaign Workflow
The most practical response is to stop treating creative upload as the final step before launch. If you are running a time-sensitive Demand Gen campaign, image creative should be uploaded and submitted for review at least five to seven business days before your intended live date. That buffer is not excessive given the delays now being confirmed. For evergreen campaigns, this matters less - but for anything promotional or time-boxed, it is essential.
It also makes sense to audit your current live Demand Gen campaigns right now. If you have image assets sitting in a pending approval state, check how long they have been there. Check whether your campaign is serving predominantly on video inventory as a result. If you have a time-sensitive campaign coming up, flag the approval delay risk to stakeholders before the launch date, not after.
Agencies managing multiple client accounts should build an approval monitoring step into their standard weekly account review. Demand Gen image ad status is not something to check only when something feels wrong. Given current delays, it needs to be part of routine QA.
What Google's Confirmation Actually Tells Us
The fact that Ginny Marvin has publicly confirmed these delays is worth paying attention to, not because it resolves the problem but because it signals that the issue is significant enough that Google felt it needed to acknowledge. Ads Liaison communications tend to be reactive - they confirm things that are generating enough noise in the advertiser community to warrant a public response. Multi-day approval delays clearly qualify.
It also suggests this is not a brief, isolated incident. Advertisers should not assume the delays will self-correct within a day or two and return to normal turnaround times. Until Google signals that the approval queue has stabilised, treating extended review times as the working baseline is the prudent approach.
The Dependency Risk Hidden Inside Automated Campaigns
Demand Gen sits at an interesting position in the paid media mix. It is more automated than traditional display, more visually led than search, and increasingly positioned as an alternative to paid social for mid-funnel audiences. That automation carries a trade-off: the more a platform manages on your behalf, the more hidden the failure points become. An approval delay in a manual campaign is visible immediately. In an automated campaign, it can look like underperformance, creative fatigue, or audience targeting issues before anyone thinks to check review status.
This is a useful reminder that AI-powered campaign management does not remove the need for hands-on account oversight. It changes where that oversight needs to be focused. Spend patterns, asset delivery, approval status, and creative mix are the levers that a human still needs to watch - because the algorithm cannot flag its own operational constraints. Demand Gen approval delays are a case study in exactly that kind of blind spot.