Workflows · 2 of 10

One source of truth for campaigns

Every marketing team has a calendar. Most have several, and none of them agree — because each one is copied by hand from wherever the work really lives.

In plain terms

You are building one list of everything marketing is running, broken down from campaigns to the pieces that deliver them. Each campaign links to the project doing the work, so its status updates itself instead of being retyped every Monday.

Three tiers, set up as a hierarchy

Start with three record types — a record type is Planning’s word for a table — stacked as Campaign, then Tactic, then Deliverable. Configure them as a hierarchy: a chain of connected record types that gives every record a breadcrumb in its header, so a single banner ad always shows which campaign it serves.

Three tiers covers most organizations. Offer a fourth, Initiative, above Campaign when leadership plans in multi-year bets. Refuse a fifth unless there is dedicated marketing operations headcount to maintain it.

Press Play for a guided tour, or select any box to jump to it.

Figure 1. The default hierarchy. Everything in blue is the plan in Planning; the gold box is where the work happens, in Workfront Workflow.

The whole hierarchy

Press Play, or select any box in the diagram, to walk through the hierarchy one tier at a time.

Connect the plan to the work

Connect Campaigns — or Tactics, if that is where projects naturally attach — to Workfront projects. Then add the project’s status and health as lookup fields: fields that display a value from the connected record. The campaign view now reflects execution without anyone copying it across.

This is also where the portfolio and program conversation happens. If your team modeled strategic work as Workfront portfolios and programs, move that layer into Planning record types and leave Workfront Workflow focused on execution. That is Adobe’s own guidance, and the main reason Planning exists. Section 7, Moving in, covers how.

Campaign structure checklist

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Campaign → Tactic → DeliverablehierarchyThree record types configured as a hierarchy, so every record shows its breadcrumb.
Start Date and End DatedateBoth come predefined on new record types. The timeline view needs two date fields — and silently skips any record missing one.
Statussingle-selectPredefined too. Name the values the way the team speaks, and color them deliberately: the colors carry the timeline view.
OwnerpeopleA campaign with no owner is one of the four reasons a calendar stops being trusted.
Brand, Region, ChannelconnectionConnections to taxonomy record types, so the timeline can group the way each audience thinks.
Workfront projectconnectionOn Campaigns or Tactics. Without it, the plan and the work drift apart.
Project status and healthlookupPulled from the connected project. Execution shows up in the plan without being retyped.

The timeline hides what it cannot draw. A record with a missing start or end date, or a start date after its end date, does not appear on the timeline view at all — no error, no placeholder. Before you show the calendar to leadership, filter the table view for empty dates.

Keeping the calendar honest

A campaign calendar earns trust by being right, and it is usually wrong in the same four ways. A weekly pass catches them:

Pull the active campaigns for the current fiscal period.
Flag the four failure modes: no connected project, no owner, no end date, or an end date in the past with the status still Live.
Fix statuses, owners, and periods as you go.
Roll the result up by brand, region, and channel for the portfolio review.

Hand people the timeline view on Campaigns, grouped the way each audience thinks: by brand for leadership, by channel for the channel leads, by market for regional teams.

# A weekly calendar check

18 active campaigns this quarter

Data-quality flags
  3 have no connected Workfront project
    (Spring refresh, Loyalty relaunch, APAC localization)
  2 are past their end date but still Live
  1 has no owner

By brand:   Core 9 · Pro 5 · Labs 4
By market:  NA 7 · EMEA 6 · APAC 5

With AI in the loop

If someone spends half of Monday writing the status update, this is the place for AI. A scheduled Fusion scenario — or an assistant on request — reads the active campaigns and their connected project health and drafts the weekly executive digest. A person edits it before it is sent.

Don’t do this

Five tiers by default

Three tiers covers most organizations; four when they ask. Deeper is fragile to maintain, and the timeline view becomes unreadable.

A record type per year

Separate Campaigns 2026 and Campaigns 2027 record types break every year-over-year comparison. Use a date or a fiscal-period field.

Status typed in twice

If the project status is retyped onto the campaign, it is wrong by Wednesday. Pull it across as a lookup field.

A calendar record type

A calendar is a way of looking at records, not a thing. It is a view, not a record type.

Limits worth knowing here

Published Planning limits that affect this build. Adobe revises these, so confirm before you design around one.
What	Limit	Why it matters for campaigns
Record types per hierarchy	4	Room for the optional Initiative tier, and no more.
Hierarchies per workspace	5	Plenty for one Marketing workspace — another reason not to split by region.
Parent records per child, in a hierarchy	10	A tactic can serve several campaigns, but not dozens.
Records per record type	25,000	Comfortable for campaigns and tactics; watch it on Deliverables in high-volume teams.
Views per record type per user	100	Not a target. Three shared views beat 40 that nobody owns.

Sources

Adobe Workfront Planning documentation — terminology, request forms, automations, object limitations: Experience League article index
Planning API reference, versions 1 and 2: developer.adobe.com/wf-planning
Package contents and entitlements: Adobe Workfront product description