Brandflux
DNA-anchored creative process

Final approval

The formal sign-off stage inside the Ship macro. Approves the production renders of a Direction as ready to lock into the DAM. The only stage Brandflux treats as formal approval.

Also called: sign-off, client approval

Final approval is the formal sign-off stage inside the Ship macro. It is the only stage Brandflux treats as formal approval. Every other reaction in the workflow (Direction picks at concept review, comments on individual variations, Recommended flags from the Lead) is signal, not signoff.

What gets approved

A defined set of Variations, on a defined channel and format, from a defined Direction, against a defined Brand DNA version. The approval record captures all four anchors so the locked master can be traced back to the exact inputs that produced it. This matters when a client asks six months later “why does this asset look like this?”, or when a brand audit asks “was this run against the post-rebrand DNA or the pre-rebrand one?”.

Who can approve

Per-campaign permission. Workspace roles don’t determine who can approve at this stage. The Campaign Lead, an Internal Reviewer, or a Client can all be Approvers on a given campaign, assigned per person, per campaign. This separates “who has access to the workspace” from “who has authority to ship on this one piece of work”.

What approval does

Three things happen on approval:

  1. The approved Variations become locked masters. The render is frozen; the file metadata is sealed.
  2. The locked masters flow into the DAM (per-brand scoped), where they become searchable, taggable, and reusable.
  3. The delivery surfaces (download links, channel queue handoffs, tokenized share URLs) become available to the Lead.

What approval does not do

It does not auto-publish to channels. The Lead still has to push to the channel queue (currently a Buffer handoff) or hand off the locked masters explicitly. Approval is the ship-permission moment, not the publish-event moment. This separation is deliberate: clients approve creative; the agency or in-house team decides exactly when the asset goes live.

Revoking approval

Once a Variation is locked, it cannot be unlocked. If something is wrong post-approval, the next move is to render a fresh Variation, approve that fresh Variation, and supersede the original in the DAM (the old version stays archived, marked superseded). This preserves the audit trail.