With our approval functionality, you have the ability to request and set approval not just for an entire plan, but also for selected media types or even just selected entries. You can also set additional levels of approval with different Approvers for each level. This article will go into how approval works, and what value they could bring you in your day-to-day processes.

Why and when to use approval

Setting up approval

Approval status and sending a plan for approval

Managing an approval request

Reporting on approval

Imagine for example that an agency is responsible for creating a plan and needs internal approval before sending the plan onto their customer for a final OK. In this case, two levels of approval can be created:

To simplify the process of choosing approvers, we can assign users who are responsible for giving approval at each level. This means that only the users assigned to the selected approval level will be displayed when selecting approvers for a plan.

Conditional approval ensures that only users assigned as approvers for a specific tag will be shown as approvers. This is based on the tag used in the selected entry(ies) being sent for approval or a tag in the plan setup.

To edit your plan approval workflow, simply go into your organization’s Settings and click on “Plan approval workflow". Here you can rename your steps and add different approvers.

The default setting for Approval is one level - Approved. If no additional settings are enabled, the workflow will be:

Working > Pending > Rejected/Approved

The following can be set in the plan’s Approval workflow settings:

When this is enabled users are forced to add a comment in order to set draft approval.

The default workflow has 2 statuses: Working and Approved. If an organization wants to add an additional status, they will need to contact their Customer Success Manager.

A single user or number of users can be selected as Approvers. This means that when a plan is sent for approval, only users who are set as ‘approvers’ will be available to select from. If no approvers are selected, all users with access to the organization will be displayed when selecting an approver.

When there are different levels of approval, users can be selected as Approvers based on approval status, e.g. an agency may create plans which need to be approved internally before being sent to the client for final approval. The agency users can be selected for the ‘Approved internal’ status and client users can be selected for ‘Approved external’ status.

Conditional approval allows you to assign different Approvers to the plan, based on the plan’s types, fields and tags. In the example below, Approvers differ depending on the media type. There is one Approver for the Out Of Home media type, and another for everything except Out Of Home:

You can add as many conditions as you want by clicking the blue “Add” button, and delete them just as easily by clicking on the “X” on the right hand side.

In the sheet view, you can choose to display the Approval Status of each entry in your plan:

“Working” means that your plan entries have not yet been sent for approval.

To send the full plan for approval, follow these steps:

All entries and media types in the plan are included when the send for approval button is used and no specific entries have been selected. The only exception to this is if there are already approved entries in the list at this point - these will be excluded from the request and only working entries (rejected or new) will be included.

The video below takes you through full plan approval step-by-step:

To send an approval request for specific entries, or the entries within just one selected media type, follow these steps:

When using this option (right click) only entries on the selected Media Type will be sent for approval.

Once the request is sent, the entries now pending approval will be represented with a little yellow hourglass, as per the image below:

When an approval request is sent, the approver will receive an email (if email notification for approval is selected in the user notification settings) and a notification in Mediatool will also appear, as in the image below:

To manage an approval, either click on the link provided in the email notification, click the in-app notification in Mediatool, or go into your Media Overview and then select “Approval requests” (on organization or plan level).

There are 2 views within Approval requests

To cancel a pending request, click on the request to open it, enter “CANCEL” (all CAPS) and then select "Cancel".

To approve or reject a request, you have two options:

Either select the specific entries you would like to respond to by checking the boxes on the left hand side, then click “Mark X entry/entries as approved/rejected” up in the top right corner:

Or select “Mark all entries as approved” or “Mark all entries as rejected” to give the same response for all entries in the plan.

The following popup window will then appear, where you can add a comment before submitting your review. The same window appears whether you approve or reject the entries:

You can hover over the entry in the sheet view to view or edit your comment:

To submit your review, click the blue “Submit request” button in the bottom right corner on the entry page. The following popup will appear, letting you know that your review is not reversible once it has been submitted:

Bear in mind that all comments you’ve added are still in “draft” until the Submit button has been pressed. If you instead select “Mark all entries as approved/rejected” before submitting, all individual comments made earlier will be overwritten with a new comment.

Once you submit, all other approvers and the requester will be notified.

Once an approval or rejection has been submitted, the requests which have been reviewed will now appear under “Closed requests” in the system:

All approved requests will now appear as “Approved” in the column on the left hand side in the sheet view, and the rejected entries will be displayed as working with a little red “rejected” icon:

Once again, you can hover over the entries to see any comments added by the approver, and you can also right-click and select “Show changelog” to also view the comments given.

You are free to amend any approved entry in your plan, however please bear in mind that this will cause the entry status to revert back to "working" per default, and it will need to be sent for approval again. A popup message will appear to remind you of this, and you can simply press "OK" to confirm and proceed:

If there are any fields that should not affect the plan status, just tick the checkbox for "New changes to this field won't affect the plan status". This will allow you to edit the field freely without having to re-submit the plan for approval.

You can easily include approval status in your reports, by creating a chart and adding “Approval step” as a dimension:

Bear in mind that this will only include approved entries, and not those that have been rejected or have not yet been sent for approval.