Campaign-level approval is a single sign-off on the campaign as a whole: the journey, the timing and every asset in it, granted after each individual asset has already been reviewed. Asset-level approval is a decision on one file at one version, and it answers a narrow question: is this email correct? Campaign-level approval answers the question no asset review can reach: do these assets, in this order, on these dates, still say the same thing?
Eight approved assets is not an approved campaign. It is eight approved assets and an untested assumption that they agree with each other.
Most teams only run the first layer. Every email, SMS, WhatsApp message and landing page gets reviewed, revised and approved, and nobody ever looks at the set. The errors that reach the inbox are rarely errors inside an asset. They are errors between two assets that were each correct on their own.
What does asset-level approval miss?
Asset-level approval misses every error that lives between two assets rather than inside one.
A reviewer looking at a single email cannot see a contradiction with the landing page it links to, because the landing page is not on screen. Four failure modes account for most of what ships broken.
| Failure mode | What the asset reviewer saw | What shipped |
|---|---|---|
| Offer drift across channels | Email v3, approved: 30% off through Sunday | Landing page still at v1, approved three days earlier: 25% off |
| Missing exit condition | A day-3 reminder email, correct in every detail | The reminder went to 1,240 people who had already bought on day 1 |
| Date mismatch between channels | SMS copy, approved: "Last day tomorrow" | The SMS was scheduled for Friday; the email said the offer ended Friday at 23:59 |
| Compliance line lost in a later version | Legal read v2, which had the disclaimer in the footer | Design rebuilt the footer for v3, the line went missing, and v3 shipped |
Offer drift happens because assets are approved on different days. The client asks for a discount bump on Tuesday, the email is revised and re-approved on Wednesday, and the landing page was signed off Monday and never reopened. Both approvals are valid. The campaign is wrong.
Missing exit conditions are invisible at asset level by definition. There is no version of a reminder email that contains the information "this audience already converted." That lives in the journey, and the journey is not an asset.
Date mismatches come from relative language. Email states absolute deadlines; SMS, constrained to 160 characters, says "tomorrow." A reviewer approving 158 characters has no send calendar in front of them.
Lost compliance lines are the expensive one. Legal approves a version, and then two more versions get built on top of it. Unless approval is version-bound, the record says the campaign was approved while the artifact that shipped was never seen by the person who approved it. Teams that track approval at the version level catch this at the moment the new version is created, rather than after the send.
The shape of this differs by team. At an agency, each asset is approved by a client contact over email, in separate threads on separate days, and nobody on either side owns the set. In-house, legal reviews the copy doc, brand reviews the design, and the director assumes somebody checked whether the pieces agree. Neither structure gives the gaps between assets an owner, which is why they survive. The in-house half of that is a role-specific approval workflow problem: four approvers, four scopes, and no agreement on which of them a revision sends back.
What does a campaign-level sign-off actually cover?
A campaign-level sign-off asserts seven things about the campaign at the moment it is signed.
If your approval step does not assert all seven, it is an asset review with a broader name.
- Version lock. Every asset in the campaign is at a specific, identified version, and those version numbers are part of the record.
- Offer consistency. The offer, price, discount and any stated conditions are identical in every asset that states them.
- Date consistency. Every deadline reads the same across channels, including relative phrasing checked against the actual send calendar.
- Journey logic. Entry conditions, wait times, branches and exit conditions are what was agreed, including who gets suppressed and when.
- Sequence and timing. The landing page is live before the email that points to it, and the SMS lands after the email rather than beside it.
- Links and destinations. Every link resolves to the intended page with the intended tracking parameters, tested on the final version rather than a staging copy.
- Named accountability. One person with authority approved it, on a date, on that identified version set, and the record survives after the campaign ships.
Point 7 is the one teams get wrong most often, and the one that matters three weeks later when someone asks who approved the wrong price. Approval scattered across email threads and Slack messages is not a record. Our approvals that hold up guide covers what a defensible sign-off record contains, and what belongs in an approval audit trail breaks that record into the six fields a dispute will test.
When is asset-level enough?
Asset-level approval is enough whenever the campaign contains nothing that can contradict itself.
Three cases qualify.
Single-asset sends. A standalone newsletter with no companion SMS and no dedicated landing page has no cross-asset surface. A campaign sign-off here is process for its own sake.
Low-stakes internal comms. An internal all-hands announcement or an employee survey invite does not need a version-locked sign-off record. The cost of an error is a correction email, not a compliance exposure.
High-volume creative variants. If you are testing 12 subject lines against one approved email body, each variant needs a copy check, not a campaign sign-off. The campaign-level decision was already made on the body, the offer and the journey. What needs one explicit decision is the test setup: how the split works and which variant wins.
The rule: campaign-level approval earns its cost as soon as two assets state the same offer, or the journey is more complex than a single send.
How do the two fit together?
Asset review rounds run first, the campaign sign-off runs last, and reversing that order voids the record.
The sequence is fixed:
- Brief agreed, production starts.
- Each asset goes through its review rounds until it is approved at a known version.
- The version set freezes. No new versions without reopening the step, which is what happens when an approved campaign changes.
- The campaign review runs across the frozen set: offer, dates, journey, sequence, links.
- Sign-off is recorded against that version set, with a name and a date.
- The campaign is handed off for scheduling and sending.
The order matters for one reason. A sign-off given before the assets are final points at versions that no longer exist by launch day, which is worse than no sign-off because it looks like coverage. The reverse rule follows from it: if any asset changes after the campaign is signed, the sign-off no longer covers it. A new version does not inherit the previous approval, which in practice means reopening that asset and asking for the sign-off again before launch.
Done properly, the campaign review is fast, usually under an hour, because you are checking agreement between assets rather than re-reading them. Do not bolt it on as a fifth round either. If your assets take four rounds each today, consolidating review rounds at asset level is what creates room for a campaign-level step.
Most campaign approval software does not model this layer, because it is built around the file as the unit of work. In LaunchSign the campaign sign-off is a separate act from the asset rounds: the approver opens one link with no account to create, sees a card for every asset in the journey with its status and who approved it on which date, then approves the campaign or requests changes with a written comment. That is one named signer per campaign: it fits the agency case directly, and in-house teams keep legal and brand at asset level while the director signs.
Whatever tool you use, the test is the same: ask who signed the campaign, on which versions, on what date. If that takes more than thirty seconds to answer, you do not have campaign-level approval yet.
FAQ
Who should give campaign-level approval?
One person with the authority to commit, not a committee. At an agency, that is the client contact who owns the budget or the brand decision. In-house, it is usually the marketing director or campaign owner, with legal and brand having already signed at asset level. Simultaneous signers create ambiguity about what happens when one of them objects.
Does campaign-level approval replace asset-level approval?
No. It runs after it and depends on it. Campaign-level approval assumes each asset is already correct and checks that the assets agree with each other. Skip the asset rounds and the campaign review becomes a proofread of eight files at once: slower, and it catches less.
How long should a campaign-level review take?
Under an hour for a typical multichannel campaign, if the asset rounds closed properly. You are comparing stated offers, checking deadlines against the send calendar, walking the journey branches and clicking links. It runs longer only when it is catching asset-level errors.
What should the sign-off record contain?
Four things at minimum: the name and role of the approver, the date, the exact version of every asset covered, and any conditions attached to the approval. A record without version numbers cannot answer the only question anyone asks after a mistake ships.
