Launch day for a Gulf campaign: what to check, and when

Launch days come in two kinds. On a good one, nothing much happens, because everything was finished properly the week before. On a bad one, the small emergencies arrive one after another: the bio link points to the old landing page, a creator publishes the draft caption, the website rejects the discount code. None of these is difficult to solve. Each one simply went unchecked when a calm fix was still possible.

Whether your agency is running the launch or your own team is, the order of work is the same, and it falls into three stages: before, during and after. The list below assumes posts on your brand's own accounts alongside some creator content, though most of it holds for any launch. If an agency is handling it, it is a fair list to ask them to walk you through.

The week before: freeze what was signed off

The first task is making sure the content that goes live is exactly the content that was approved. That sounds obvious, until a designer adjusts something after sign-off, or a creator is working from an older brief, and what appears in the feed differs from what was agreed.

• Lock the approved version of every post, caption and video, and note who approved each one and when.
• Any change made after approval needs approving again, however minor. A corrected price counts. So does an extra hashtag.
• Confirm each creator has the final, signed-off content and wording, not an earlier draft buried in the chat.
• Put in writing who on the brand side can halt the launch, and how they can be reached that day.

Scheduling belongs in this step too. Check the time zone on every scheduled post. The UAE is one hour ahead of Saudi Arabia, so a campaign running in both has to choose which country's morning it goes live in. If the scheduler is set to the wrong zone, it will publish an hour early or an hour late without telling anyone.

The day before: click everything

Broken links spoil more launches than weak creative does. The day before, open every single one yourself, on a phone, away from the office network. Include the bio link, the swipe links in stories, every creator's caption link and any QR code printed on physical material.

• Every link lands on the live page, not a staging address or last season's offer.
• Links that need tracking parameters have them, so your analytics can separate campaign traffic from everything else.
• Each discount code is accepted at checkout, on the right products, in each country the campaign covers.
• On a phone, the landing page opens fast, in both Arabic and English if the campaign runs in both.

Where each creator has a unique code, test them one at a time. A code that fails silently costs more than a sale. It also leaves a hole in the report, since the sales you can track are the only revenue the campaign can honestly take credit for.

Before anyone posts: disclosure and permits

Any creator post that was paid for or gifted has to be recognisable as advertising. Use the platform's paid partnership tool where one exists, together with a plain label, "Ad" for instance, opening the caption or shown on screen. Stories are included, and so are posts made in return for free product.

Settle the permit question before publishing, not afterwards. In the UAE, creators who advertise need an advertiser permit from the National Media Authority. For content aimed at Saudi Arabia, check the creator's Mawthooq licence. Make sure each permit stays valid for the whole posting window, and keep a record of the check against the creator's name.

On the day: confirm, never assume

When a post is published, pull it up on the platform itself and compare it with the approved version: caption, tags, disclosure label, link, and the first comment if you planned one. If a post did not publish, or appeared without the partner tag, it is much simpler to put right in the first ten minutes than by mid-afternoon.

Keep a simple log through the day of what went live, at what time, and what had to be fixed. It costs a few minutes and settles most of the questions raised afterwards.

Who is watching the comments

Before launch, decide who will monitor comments, across which accounts, and until when. The first few hours usually count most, since that is when confusion is either cleared up quickly or allowed to spread.

• One named person per platform, with someone covering breaks and the evening.
• Pre-approved answers to the questions you can see coming: price, availability, delivery, where to buy and how the offer works.
• A clear list of what gets escalated instead of answered, such as product complaints, anything touching religion or politics, and any mention of legal action.
• Creators asked to send tricky comments on their posts your way instead of answering in haste.

Most launch comments are straightforward, and a prompt, courteous reply helps the campaign more than a witty one. The escalation list is there for the rare comment that should wait until the right person has read it.

The first 24 hours after

By the end of the first day, or within 24 hours, there should be a short update covering the posts that went out, the fixes made, any early figures that can be verified, and anything awaiting a decision. It is not the campaign report. Its job is to show that someone is on top of things, and to give the marketing lead something to forward internally before anyone asks.

This is also the moment to gather the figures you will need later, before they disappear. Story data vanishes from creators' insights fast, so collect story numbers within 24 hours, and feed post numbers within whatever window your agreement sets. An undated screenshot found three weeks later does not belong in a report.

An uneventful launch day, seen from outside, is usually the sign of a busy week before it.

Keep the list with the campaign

A checklist kept in someone's notebook is useful to them alone. Attached to the campaign, it is useful to whoever steps in. The parts of launch day that slip most easily are the approval history of each post and a running count of posts that failed, posts that were missed and posts still waiting on approval, so keep both where the whole team can see them. The rest is habit, and habits last longest when they are visible.

If you have a launch coming up and would like a second pair of eyes on the plan, from approvals through to the first report, talk it through with ALXO before the date is fixed.