A preflight check is an automated verification step run before a marketing campaign goes live, checking things like pricing consistency, tracking configuration, and required approvals across every system a campaign touches.
The term is borrowed from aviation, where a preflight check is a fixed sequence of verifications completed before a plane is cleared for departure — not optional, not dependent on memory, run the same way every time. Applied to marketing, a preflight check plays the same role: catching the kind of mistake — a price mismatch, a broken tracking tag, a missing sign-off — that’s cheap to fix before launch and expensive to fix after.