Approval threads stall on global assets because nobody agreed what a local team may change. So every edit looks like a possible brand violation, and every edit goes back to head office. The fix is a two-column rule: what is locked, and what is free to localize. Once that exists, most local edits need no global approval at all.
TLDR: Write down the locked elements and the localizable elements for each global asset. Send local edits to a local approver. Send them to the global owner only when a locked element changed.
Mydrop data, September 2026: on posts that went through a client approval on Mydrop, the median time from submission to approval was 6 hours, and 66% were approved within 24 hours. Method in the Mydrop social media benchmarks.
Why one edited caption can freeze a whole thread
Picture a global campaign image. The Lyon team translates the caption and swaps the offer. The global brand manager sees a changed post and cannot tell what else moved. She asks for the original, compares, and writes back with questions.
Three days pass for a change that was entirely allowed. Multiply that by every market and every post.
The delay is not caused by bad local teams or slow global teams. It is caused by approvers having to rediscover the rules on every post.
Write the locked and localizable lists once
Do this as a one-page table per campaign, or per brand if the rules rarely change:
| Element | Local team can change? | Who approves a change |
|---|---|---|
| Logo, brand colors, fonts | No | Global brand owner |
| Core claim and product name | No | Global brand owner |
| Legal and disclosure lines | No | Legal |
| Caption language and tone | Yes | Local approver |
| Local offer, price display, dates | Yes | Local approver |
| Hashtags and local tags | Yes | Local approver |
| Image crop for the platform | Yes, within safe area | Local approver |
Keep it short. A list of forty rules will be ignored. Eight lines will be used.
Route by what changed, not by who changed it
Once the table exists, approval routing becomes mechanical:
- Local team edits only free elements: local approver signs off, the post is scheduled.
- Local team touches a locked element: the post goes to the global owner with the change highlighted.
- Local team needs something the table does not cover: they ask once, and the answer becomes a new row.
Rule 3 is how the table improves. Every unanswered question is a row you have not written yet.
In Mydrop, each market can be a brand or workspace with its own members, so the local approver sits in the local workspace and global owners are added only where they need to see things. See workspaces and brands for how that separation works. The approval flow then follows the roles you set.
Keep one current version of every global asset
A lot of local edits start from the wrong file. Someone downloads a logo from an old email, adjusts a crop, and the global team rejects it for using last year's version.
Put the current files in one library per brand, retire old versions, and give local teams access to that library instead of asking by message. If you want the audit steps, the asset version audit walks through checking which versions are still floating around.
Measure two numbers for a month
You do not need a dashboard. Track:
- Edit-to-approval time for local posts that touched only free elements. It should be same day.
- Number of global escalations per week. It should fall as the table gets complete.
If escalations stay high, you are probably missing rows in the table. If edit-to-approval time stays long, the local approver is a bottleneck and needs a backup.
Start with one campaign
Take your next global campaign. Before the local teams open the files, send them the locked and localizable table and name the local approver for each market. Review how many posts went back to head office afterward.
When you want the routing handled by roles instead of email, you can try it free on Mydrop and set up your first market as its own brand.
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