How many workflow stages should a campaign have?

As few as capture real decisions. A stage should represent something somebody decided, with evidence for the transition. Task-shaped stages add maintenance without adding information, and they are the first ones skipped when the campaign gets busy, which is when the board stops being true.

Should every creator post on the same day?

Only when a concentrated moment is genuinely the strategy and it has been resourced. Otherwise staggering extends the campaign’s presence and lets the early posts inform the later briefs, which a simultaneous launch makes impossible.

What is the most underestimated step in a campaign?

Getting from an agreed rate to a creator who can legally start work: vendor onboarding, contract redlines, tax documentation and purchase orders. It involves departments outside marketing with their own queues, it is invisible in a creative plan, and at a large company it can take longer than the production it precedes.

Campaign operations and relationships

How do you actually run a campaign once the deals are signed?

10 guides · Last verified September 2, 2026

What this part of the work is

Operations is the least glamorous part of this work and the part where campaigns are most reliably won or lost. The failures are specific and repeatable: a board nobody updated during launch week, a creator with five deliverables tracked as one row, a rights window that expired while the asset kept running, a pileup that happened because everyone’s availability clustered.

These guides cover designing workflow stages that survive a busy week, scheduling and sequencing, keeping launch day from becoming a bottleneck, onboarding creators so the mechanics are tested before they matter, tracking deliverables as obligations rather than as a status, running product seeding as logistics, managing communications, building relationships that last past one campaign, and operating across regions.

The through-line is that most of these failures are structural rather than personal. They are caused by systems that cost more to maintain than the work leaves room for, and they are fixed by making the right thing cheap to do rather than by asking people to try harder.

Where it goes wrong

The failures that recur here

01
A board only stays true if updating it is cheap
Every operations system is designed well, adopted enthusiastically and abandoned during the first campaign that gets busy, because updating it competes with the work it describes. The practical test is whether the board can be brought current in a couple of minutes at the end of a day. If not, it will not be, during exactly the week it matters.
02
One row per creator loses the obligations
A partner contracted for four outputs has four due dates, four review states and four sets of evidence. Compressed into one status, the record shows whichever one somebody thought about most recently, and the rest go untracked until a payment dispute or a report that will not reconcile surfaces them.
03
Rights expiry has no natural reminder
The ad platform keeps serving, the landing page keeps the embed, and the retail asset stays in the deck long past the licensed term. Nothing in a normal marketing stack tracks that date, so it needs an owner and an inventory of where each asset was deployed, which is trivial to keep during deployment and close to impossible to reconstruct after.

Every guide in this section