What's the right ratio of central to local content in a multi-venue campaign?

Sixty percent central, thirty percent local-customized, ten percent venue-original. Below sixty central, you lose brand consistency. Above seventy-five, the venues feel like billboards. The thirty in the middle is where the campaign earns its keep — it's the part that makes a Yaletown launch look different from a Kelowna launch even though they're the same campaign.

How do you handle venues that don't participate?

First, find out why. Eight times out of ten, it's not resistance — it's that they didn't see the brief in time, or it landed during a service week they couldn't survive. Build a two-week lead time into every push and a single non-mandatory option for venues that genuinely can't run it that week.

What about franchisees who want full creative control?

Give it to them on local campaigns and hold the line on group campaigns. The split is: anything that ties to the brand promise (LTOs, partnerships, national holidays) is group-controlled. Anything that's purely about the local market — Mother's Day brunch, a high-school graduation push — is theirs.

How to push one campaign to 12 venues without making each one mediocre.

The problem with multi-venue marketing isn't strategy. It's the seventeen days between when HQ writes a brief and when every venue actually has the assets in hand.

In those seventeen days, three things happen. The venues guess. The brief drifts. The launch hits in twelve markets on twelve different days, with twelve different headlines, and the post-mortem says "Calgary executed well, Yaletown didn't."

Calgary executed well because the GM personally rewrote the brief at 11pm the night before. Yaletown didn't because their GM was working a double Saturday and never opened the email.

Here's how to close the gap.

The 60-30-10 brief

Every multi-venue campaign brief should be three layers stacked:

60% central. The non-negotiables. The campaign promise, the headline framework, the offer terms, the visual identity, the dates. This is what HQ controls and it should be airtight. If a venue can't ship this exactly as-written, the brief failed.

30% local-customized. The fill-in-the-blanks. The neighborhood reference, the specific staff name on the social post, the local partner if there is one, the venue-specific photo. This is what the venue swaps in to make the campaign feel like it belongs to them.

10% venue-original. The completely-up-to-the-venue layer. A second social post they wrote themselves. A staff-meal feature. An off-brief experiment they want to try. Some venues will skip this entirely. The strong ones won't.

The mistake most HQ teams make is collapsing the 30 into the 60. They write a fully-finished campaign and ship it. The result feels generic in every market.

The two-week push cadence

Every campaign moves through the same nine days, regardless of size:

Day -14: Brief drops. 60% layer finalized.
Day -10: Local customization window opens. Venues have four days to swap in their 30%.
Day -6: Customization closes. HQ reviews and approves each venue's localized version. Twenty minutes per venue, max.
Day -3: Assets in venue inboxes. Social caption, hero image, in-venue collateral, staff briefing card.
Day 0: Campaign live across all venues simultaneously.

The window matters. Shorter than two weeks and venues don't have time to do the local work. Longer and they forget.

What HQ controls vs what the venue controls

Three things HQ always controls:

The headline. Variants are fine; rewrites are not.
The offer mechanics. Same promo code logic, same redemption rules, everywhere.
The visual identity. Same palette, same typography, same brand mark placement.

Three things the venue always controls:

The local imagery. HQ provides a stock option; venues can swap to their own venue shot.
The local copy callout. "Bowen Island guests get a 4pm tide table with their drink" is venue-original. It's a campaign post.
The local partner mention. If the venue has a partnership with a neighborhood business that fits the campaign, they get to weave it in.

The Friday review

Every Friday morning, HQ runs a fifteen-minute review of every active multi-venue campaign. The review covers three numbers per venue:

Posts scheduled vs. posts published.
Redemptions vs. forecast.
Customer feedback (positive, negative, or no signal).

The review isn't a status meeting. It's a working session. Venues with red numbers get a question, not a critique: "What do you need to unblock this?" The unblock is usually small — the social caption was too long for IG, the hero image got rejected by Meta's review, the LTO ingredient got 86'd. Fifteen minutes of HQ time on a Friday saves four days of drift the next week.

The post-mortem template

Every multi-venue campaign closes with a one-page post-mortem. Three sections:

What worked everywhere: The lines, plays, or mechanics that hit across markets. These go in the next campaign brief.

What worked in some markets: The localizations that drove outperformance. These become the optional menu for next time — a Calgary GM seeing a Yaletown play that worked can pull it without rewriting the brief.

What didn't work: The mistakes. Owned by HQ, not the venues. The venues executed what they were given.

That's the operating model. Two-week push, 60-30-10 brief, Friday review, post-mortem. Same template every time. Twelve venues, one campaign, twelve markets that each feel like the campaign was made for them.

— Damon