Three rounds of changes, and why most pieces use one

Every package includes three rounds of changes on every piece, and a fourth costs £40. That sounds like a lot of rounds. In practice it is insurance nobody uses.

Across the 270 pieces in the six case studies on this site, 231 went out after one round, 33 needed two and 6 needed three. Nobody has paid for a fourth this year. At Ostro, a founder who hates being on camera, four of thirty-six pieces needed a second round, and all four were the same note about the colour of the sauce.

Rounds are a symptom. When a piece needs three, it is almost never the edit. It is that the brief said “energetic” and meant two different things to two different people, and the first cut is the first time anyone could see which.

So we move the disagreement earlier, where it is cheap. For a forty-piece month you get twelve concepts, one line each, before anyone picks up a camera. A line like “hands only, product enters frame at second two, no voiceover” is easy to argue with. A finished piece is not.

The other half is who gives the notes. One person on your side collects them and sends one list per batch. When notes arrive from three people in three threads, a single round turns into three without anyone deciding it should.

We keep the three rounds in the price anyway. Some launches change their mind for good reasons, and a studio that charges for every correction teaches clients to stop asking for them.