📸 Visual Merchandising & Photo Compliance
Need to know that a campaign display was actually built, in every store, the way it was briefed? A Media Task asks store staff to submit a photograph from the shop floor, and the Compliance Dashboard shows you completion and gaps in real time — so campaign readiness stops being a phone call and becomes something you can see. 📸
In questo articolo:
✍️ Building a Visual Merchandising Check
🤝 Sharing Results with a Brand
📷 What a Media Task Is
A Media Task is one of the action types you can add to an article. It asks the member to upload a picture, which makes it the right tool whenever you need visual documentation rather than a tick in a box.
It behaves like any other action: it is assigned to an audience, it can be mandatory, it can carry a deadline or a recurring schedule, and its completion is tracked.
Used for visual merchandising, it turns "is the campaign up?" into a picture from each store, instead of a status somebody typed in.
Note: Media Task is one of eight action types. See 🎯 Actions in Atobi for the full list and every setting they share.
⚠️ Important: A check is completed by each store for itself. A field rep or district manager cannot currently complete checks across a portfolio of stores from one account. If that is the process you need, design the check around it before you publish.
✍️ Building a Visual Merchandising Check
- In Article Studio, create or open the article for the campaign.
- Add an image block showing the display the store should be matching, with the key points written underneath it. This is your reference — stores compare against it while they build.
- Add a Media Task action below it.
- Write the instruction as one specific, checkable thing. "Photograph the full window display from the front, in daylight" beats "check the display".
- Set Required completion by to one per location — you want one photo per store, not one per member.
- Mark it mandatory so it counts toward compliance.
- Set the deadline. For campaign readiness this is usually the day before launch, not the day of.
- Choose the audience so the check reaches the stores it applies to and no others.
- Publish.
💡 Tip: One action per thing you want to see. Three separate Media Tasks for window, table and till point give you three usable compliance numbers. One action asking for "photos of the campaign" gives you a folder nobody reviews.
⚠️ Important: Once answers start arriving you can still edit the title, description and images — but you cannot change the deadline, the recurring settings, whether the action is mandatory, or who has to complete it. Get those right before you publish.
🔁 Recurring Checks
For standards that need checking repeatedly rather than once per campaign — cleanliness, core range presence, till-point setup — set the action to recur instead of rebuilding it each time.
Actions can repeat daily, weekly or monthly, and each repeat becomes its own instance with its own completion figure, so you get a trend rather than a single snapshot:
- Daily — choose which days of the week, and the time window in which the check must be completed.
- Weekly — choose which weeks of the month, and the exact day and time.
- Monthly — choose which months of the year, and the specific date and time.
Note: Members cannot complete a recurring action before its window opens, but they can submit late. Recurrence stops when the article is archived or deleted.
✅ Reviewing Submissions
Submitted photos land on the Insights tab of the article itself. Open the article in Article Studio and select Insights.
What you see there
Each action shows its completion rate — how many stores or members have completed, out of how many were assigned — and you can open it to see the submissions themselves.
- Sort by date, by most reactions, or by Near me, which follows your location hierarchy.
- Filter by audience or by location, so a regional manager reviews their own stores.
- See who has not submitted, with the completion time for those who have.
Who can see the photos
This follows the action's answer visibility setting:
- Public — other members can see submissions. Viewers see them immediately; assignees see them once they have submitted their own.
- Private — only the article's creator and collaborators can see them.
💡 Tip: Public works well for visual merchandising. Stores raise their game when they can see what the other stores built — and it turns the check into a source of examples rather than a one-way audit.
📊 Tracking Compliance
For the numbers across stores, use the Compliance Dashboard.
❓ Key Questions It Answers
What percentage of stores have submitted?
Actions completed against actions assigned.
Which stores have not?
The Non-Compliant Members overview lists them, so the follow-up goes to the stores that need it rather than to everyone.
Who submitted late?
Completions after the deadline are tracked separately, which is usually a better early-warning signal than the headline completion number.
Is the network getting better?
Engagement history shows the trend across campaigns, which is what tells you whether execution is actually improving or just varying.
Note: The Compliance Dashboard works at single article level, so filter to the specific campaign article to read its data. Tables can be exported to Excel. See ✅ Advanced Dashboards - Compliance.
💡 Tip: Put your visual merchandising articles in a shared category. The Compliance Dashboard filters by category, so you get one compliance number for visual merchandising across every campaign you have run.
🤝 Sharing Results with a Brand
If the campaign article reached you through Atobi Connect — shared by a brand to your stores — the submitted photos can flow back to that brand, so they can see execution across their retailers without asking anyone for a report.
The retailer controls this. Answer sharing is a setting on the connection and on the individual article, decided when the article is accepted, so nothing leaves the organisation unless it has been allowed to.
🔗 Read more about Atobi Connect
💡 Best Practice
- Ask before launch, not after. A photo check dated the day before go-live gives you time to fix a store. The same check on launch day only tells you what went wrong.
- Show what good looks like. A reference image above the action raises compliance more than any amount of written instruction.
- Keep the ask small. Store staff have minutes. One clear photograph they can take in thirty seconds gets submitted; a five-part audit does not.
- One per location. Asking every member to photograph the same window gives you noise, not coverage.
- Close the loop. Publishing the best submissions to the Feed does more for the next campaign than chasing the stores that missed this one.
📎 Related Articles
📝 How to Create an Article in Atobi
🚀 How to Publish an Article in Atobi
✅ Advanced Dashboards - Compliance