Plan, Make, Ship is the three-phase macro arc every Brandflux Campaign runs through. It is the user-facing framing for the underlying 17-stage creative-ops workflow. Each macro has an approved state, each macro gates the next, and the boundary between macros is a deliberate sign-off moment, not a state-machine flag the system flips on its own.
Plan
The Plan macro covers everything that happens before the first render commits credits. It includes the Brief, the references the Lead pulls from the brand archive or uploads fresh, and the one to three named Directions the campaign will explore. The Plan macro is approved as a single unit. Approving the plan is the team’s commitment to spend rendering credits on the named Directions under the agreed brief.
Make
The Make macro is where the Variations get rendered, the team reviews them internally, the client reacts to the named Directions at concept review, and the team picks a Direction to take into production. Comment-first review through this macro; the only formal approval inside Make is “the client picked Direction X”, which is signal for the Make team to focus rendering effort, not signoff for delivery.
Ship
The Ship macro covers Final approval, the locking of approved masters into the DAM, the handoff to the distribution surface (currently Buffer for queue handoffs, direct download for the rest), and the close of the campaign. Once Ship is approved, the campaign is in delivery mode. The DAM is updated, the metadata is sealed, the delivery surface is live.
Why three, not seventeen
The underlying workflow has 17 stages because the work is genuinely that detailed. Three macros are the right number for the user-facing framing because that’s the number a Lead can hold in their head and the number a client can review without losing the plot. The 17 stages remain visible in the product (the workflow tracker shows them), and the macros wrap them so the high-level approvals stay legible. A fourth macro, Performance, exists in the spec and is intentionally hidden in the product until demand for it surfaces.
How approvals roll up
The plan-level approval covers the plan macro. The Direction pick at concept review is a Make-internal signal. Final approval covers the ship macro. There is no per-stage approval gate. This is a deliberate departure from earlier specs that had a “Lock brief” gate; the per-step approval pattern produced more friction than it caught.
Related on this site
- /glossary/campaign is the container the macros run inside.
- /glossary/brief is the artifact at the heart of Plan.
- /glossary/final-approval is the gate at the heart of Ship.
- /product walks through the macros end to end.