The honest answer is a range
Ask five agencies how long it takes to get a new campaign live and the answers land somewhere between three days and a month. Both ends are true. The spread is not a measure of how good the shop is. It is a measure of how many people have to touch the work before it can go.
That distinction is worth understanding, because it changes what you should be asking for.
What a build actually contains
Strip away the project plan and a campaign build is five things. Someone writes down what is being promoted, to whom, where, for how long, and with how much budget behind it. Someone produces the creative — headlines, descriptions, images or video, cut to the sizes each platform demands. Someone traffics it, building the structure, audiences, geography, schedules, budgets and conversion tracking inside each ad platform separately, each one a different interface with different rules. Someone checks that the links work, the tracking fires, the geography is right, the budget is right and nobody has accidentally targeted the entire country. Then the person paying for it looks at what has been built and says yes.
None of those five steps is slow. Together they are a few hours of actual work.
Touch time and queue time
A few hours becomes two or three weeks because the five steps live with different people, and every handoff introduces a wait.
Here is the shape it usually takes. The brief goes to an account manager who needs a call to clarify it, and the next open slot is Thursday. The clarified brief joins the creative queue, which is working through last week's requests. Creative comes back needing one revision, which rejoins the same queue. Approved creative goes to trafficking, which builds in the order it received. QA finds a tracking issue, which goes back to trafficking. The finished build goes out for approval, and the owner is on a job site until Monday.
Count the work in that sequence and it is a few hours. Count the calendar and it is three weeks. Every gap is one person waiting for another person to become available.
That gap is the number nobody quotes when they give you a turnaround time. Turnaround is measured on the calendar. The work was never the problem.
Why faster people do not fix it
The instinct is to solve this by hiring better — faster designers, more trafficking staff, a tighter account team. It does not work, and the reason is structural. If a job takes two hours of work and spends three days in a queue, halving the work time saves one hour out of three days. You have improved the smallest term in the equation.
Queues are not sensitive to how fast the people in them are. They are sensitive to how many things are in line, and how often work is handed from one line to another. Adding people usually makes that worse, because a larger creative team needs someone routing creative and a larger trafficking team needs someone assigning builds. Every new coordination point is a new place for work to sit.
This is why agencies staffed with genuinely excellent people still quote two to three weeks. They are not slow. They are queued.
What to ask instead
Turnaround time is the wrong question, because every shop answers it with a calendar figure that hides the queue. Ask instead how many people touch a campaign between your request and it going live. The answer is a count of handoffs, and handoffs are where the time is. A shop that cannot answer quickly has never looked.
Then ask what happens when you want to change the budget on a campaign that is already running. If the answer involves a ticket, a queue, or a named person's availability, you have found the same structure again — only now it applies to every adjustment for the life of the account rather than just the initial build.
What has to be true to compress it
If waiting is the problem, then compressing a build means eliminating waits rather than accelerating work, and four things have to be true at once.
The context cannot be rebuilt from scratch each time, or you are paying for a discovery call before anything gets made. Creative cannot sit in a separate queue waiting to be requested from another team. Trafficking cannot be manual and platform by platform, with one person rebuilding the same campaign five times in five interfaces. And QA cannot be a person reading a checklist, because links resolving, tracking firing, geography matching and budget matching are deterministic checks that should run as part of the build and fail it when something is wrong.
Remove those four waits and what remains is approval, which is the only step that genuinely requires a human to look at something and decide.
Where that leaves sixty seconds
That is the whole claim behind a campaign going live in under a minute. It is not that the work happens faster than a person could do it. It is that none of it is waiting on anyone.
Setup happens once — your services, your service area, your budget, the way you want to be represented — captured a single time rather than re-established on a call before every build. After that, putting something new in market is a change rather than a rebuild. A new offer, a larger budget, two more towns. The creative, the platform builds and the checks run in one pass off that setup, and what comes back is a campaign to look at and approve.
The approval step is still yours, and it should be. The campaigns run in your own ad accounts, so what gets built belongs to you. What changes is not the quality of the work. It is that the calendar stops being the unit of measurement.