Review

What happens after you submit

About a 3-minute read.

You filled out the campaign form and clicked Register. Here's what happens between that click and a campaign you can send from.

The flow

  1. AgentMessage files your campaign with The Campaign Registry (TCR). We validate the submission as we file it and translate your form into what the registry expects. Your campaign starts in Pending.
  2. The carriers review it. TCR routes the campaign to AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon. They check that your samples match your use case, that your opt-in flow is real, that your privacy policy meets their requirements, and that the brand is the actual sender. The carriers, not AgentMessage and not TCR, make the approval call.
  3. The status updates. When the carriers accept it, the campaign becomes Active and you can attach numbers. If something fails review, it comes back rejected with whatever reason the carriers provided.

This is asynchronous. You don't have to sit on the page, the campaign's detail page reflects the current status, and you can subscribe to webhook events (campaign approval, brand vetting) so your application is notified when the state changes.

How long

  • Standard use cases (the ones in the dropdown): clean submissions are often approved within hours, sometimes the same hour. Typical: same day to ~2 business days.
  • Carrier-reviewed special use cases (charity, political, emergency, and the like, set up via support): each carrier reviews manually on its own schedule. Plan for 1-4 weeks.

Reviews can also move in bursts, a campaign can sit "Pending" for a couple of days and then resolve all at once. A slow review isn't necessarily a bad sign.

Why a campaign can be approved on some carriers but not others

Each carrier reviews independently. For standard use cases they usually move together, but for carrier-reviewed use cases one carrier may approve while another is still looking. Until a given carrier has approved, traffic to that carrier's subscribers is blocked at the network, no error to you, just no delivery there, while approved carriers deliver normally.

What to do while you wait

  • Don't re-submit out of impatience. It restarts the clock and doesn't speed anything up.
  • Don't try to attach numbers yet. They won't attach until the campaign is fully approved, and trying early just fails. See Phone number problems.
  • Do re-read your samples. If you spot a wording problem, small fixes can be re-filed without starting over, contact support. Structural changes (use case, the content toggles) require re-creating the campaign.

If it's rejected

You'll see the reason on the campaign. Most rejections are a same-day fix once you know what to change. Start with How rejections work.

After approval

Attach your phone numbers and send. The first attach on a freshly approved campaign can take a few minutes to propagate, see Attach phone numbers.

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