What is a campaign approval chain?

A campaign approval chain is the ordered list of review stages a piece of work moves through before it is cleared. A simple chain might run from a marketing lead to a brand reviewer to legal, with each stage adding its own check.

Each stage in a chain has its own rule. A stage can require every named approver to sign off, or it can advance as soon as any one approver does. Approvers can be internal users or external email-only guests, which suits a team that sends drafts to outside counsel or an agency reviewer who does not have an account.

A rejection at any stage should not lose the work. In Cohiva Campaign a rejection routes the task back to in production with the reviewer's comment, and the task re-enters the chain once it is updated. This keeps a clear trail of why a piece of work was sent back.

Cohiva Campaign enforces the chain on the server, so a client cannot mark a task approved by itself. The author cannot be the approver, which keeps the review independent, and every approval is written to an append-only audit. Once the chain completes, the campaign still has to clear the compliance gate before it can go live.

It helps to keep the approval chain and the compliance gate separate in your mind. The chain is about people agreeing the work is good: a brand reviewer, a legal reviewer, a manager. The gate is about the campaign meeting a defined set of requirements before it launches. A piece of work can pass every human approval and still be held at the gate if, say, a usage-rights confirmation is outstanding, which is why the two controls together are stronger than either alone.

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