How to Measure Video Speed-to-Market
Speed-to-market is the lag between needing a video and publishing it. For marketing teams it is a revenue metric. Here is how to measure and improve it.
What is video speed-to-market?
Video speed-to-market is the time between deciding you need a video and publishing it. It covers briefing, production, editing, review, and approval. For a marketing team it is not an operational metric, it is a revenue metric, because campaign impact decays with every week of delay.
Why does it matter to revenue?
McKinsey puts campaign impact lost at around 15 percent for every week of delay. A campaign that slips a month can lose a large share of its potential before it even launches. Speed-to-market is the difference between a video that supports a campaign at its peak and one that arrives as the moment fades. You can model the cost with the enterprise video ROI calculator.
How do you measure it?
Track the full lag, not just the edit. Time-stamp four points: request raised, brief approved, first cut delivered, final published. The gaps between them show where the time goes. Most teams find briefing and approval, not editing, are the longest stages. The turnaround benchmark is in what a good video turnaround time looks like.
What slows it down?
- Long briefs that turn into meetings.
- Review chains with more approvers than the work needs.
- Per-project production timelines that treat every video as new.
- A single in-house bottleneck that cannot absorb campaign spikes.
How do you improve it?
Standardize the brief, cap the approval chain, define revisions up front, and use a production model built for repeatable turnaround. The result is campaigns that launch on time and hold their full impact. To take the case to finance, pair the speed numbers with the business case for enterprise video.
Where to start
Measure speed-to-market on your next campaign video using the four time-stamps above, then run the enterprise video ROI calculator to value the lag.
Sources
- McKinsey: campaign impact lost per week of delay.
- HubSpot: engagement decline from delayed time-sensitive content.
- Gartner: annual cost of training delays per 1,000 employees.
- Salesforce: share of organizational failures linked to poor communication.
- Shootsta customer reporting across 70,000+ videos produced.