Reviewing Creatives
This page is the task itself. It is written for the employees who review creatives — owners, admins, managers and moderators. Viewers can open both queues and read them, but every action on this page is closed to them.
Before you start, know which flow you are in. The two queues behave differently. See the section overview if you are not sure.
Who can review
Approving or rejecting requires an employee role of owner, admin, manager or moderator, and the creative must belong to your own organization. The moderator role exists for this work.
If your organization uses employee positions, the role also decides which positions you may vote for:
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Owner and admin can record a verdict for any position.
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Manager and moderator can record a verdict only for positions they personally belong to.
If you cannot see a position you expect, you are not a member of it. Ask an owner or admin to add you — see positions. The owner or admin confirms who is asking before changing a position’s members, because membership decides whose verdict counts.
Reviewing a moderation request
Open the Requests screen. Requests waiting for a decision are in the new state. Each one shows the creative preview, the submitting demand partner, the submission time and the creative’s metadata.
Approving
Approving a moderation request creates the campaign and advertisements behind it and makes the creative eligible to win.
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Open the request.
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Check the creative against your organization’s technical requirements and whatever legal or brand-safety rules apply. Nothing on this screen does that for you.
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If the creative should run only on some of your faces, set the scope first — see Restricting a creative to particular faces.
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Approve. If your organization uses positions, choose the position you are approving for.
An approval takes no reason.
At the moment of approval the platform re-checks that every media file is still reachable and still of the declared content type. If a file has disappeared or changed type since it was submitted, the approval fails and the request stays in new.
Rejecting
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Open the request.
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Reject, and enter the reason.
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If your organization uses positions, choose the position you are rejecting for.
A reason is required on every rejection. It is free text, and it is sent to the demand partner verbatim. See rejection and resubmission for exactly how it travels and what happens next.
Reviewing a layout
Open the Layouts screen. The tabs group the five layout statuses into three: approving (waiting or sent back for review), confirmed, and rejected (rejected or withdrawn).
You can download the file to inspect it before deciding.
Three verdicts are available on a layout waiting for a decision:
- Confirm
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The layout is usable on automated guaranteed advertisements. The demand partner is told the layout is reserved.
- Send back for review
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The layout is not rejected, but the demand partner is asked to look at it again. This is the outcome to use when a correction would make the creative acceptable. A comment is required.
- Reject
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The layout is refused. A comment is required.
A comment is required on both rejection and send-back. The demand partner can respond to a send-back by withdrawing the layout or by resubmitting it, which returns it to the queue.
A confirmed layout cannot be reviewed again by an employee: confirmed is a final status, and the platform refuses any employee-driven change out of it. The demand partner is not bound by that — see rejection and resubmission.
Positions: several departments signing off
If your organization has defined one or more employee positions, a single verdict does not decide anything on its own. The platform waits until every position defined by the organization has recorded a verdict, then combines them:
| Verdicts recorded | Outcome |
|---|---|
At least one rejection |
Rejected. The rejecting positions' reasons are joined together and sent to the demand partner as one text. |
No rejection, at least one send-back (layouts only) |
Sent back for review. The comments are joined together the same way. |
Every position approved |
Confirmed. |
Until the last position votes, the request or layout stays where it is and nothing is sent anywhere.
Your own verdict is recorded as soon as you submit it, whether or not it decides the outcome. Recording a verdict for a position that has already voted the same way replaces the earlier one, so a position holds one verdict. The interface only offers you positions that have not already voted that way.
| If the demand partner resubmits the creative while the request is still in new, every recorded verdict is discarded and all positions must vote again. See rejection and resubmission. |
Restricting a creative to particular faces
Scoping is available on the moderation-request flow only.
Set the scope on the request before approving it. Two modes are available:
- Allow list
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The creative may run only on the faces you select.
- Block list
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The creative may run on any face except the ones you select.
If no scope is set, the creative has no face restriction. On screens run by CS Play the creative may run on every face of the organization. On KIS, SpinetiX and CubicVision the platform limits the creative to the faces whose aspect ratio matches its media.
Use this when a location has content restrictions, when local regulation prohibits a category of advertising in a particular place, or when a creative is only appropriate for some of your sites.
On approval the demand partner is told which faces the creative was approved for, so it knows where it may bid.
Setting the scope is open to the owner, admin, manager and moderator roles, the same set that can approve.
What happens after you approve
On the moderation-request flow, approving does three things, in this order:
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Creates the campaign and one advertisement per media file.
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For some integrations only, pushes the creative to the content management system that runs your screens.
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Marks the request and its creative confirmed, and tells the demand partner — with the list of faces the creative was approved for.
The order is the part worth remembering. If the content management system refuses the push, the approval fails as a whole: the request stays in new, the demand partner is not told, and you see the error on the approve action.
On the layout flow, confirming tells the demand partner and nothing else. The layout becomes usable on an automated guaranteed advertisement, which is pushed to the content management system as part of its campaign.
Creatives that go stale on their own
The platform re-checks the media files on every moderation request still sitting in new. If a file has become unreachable or is no longer of the declared type, the request is taken out of the queue, its creative is withdrawn, and the demand partner is told the creative was rejected because the file is not valid or no longer exists.
No employee is involved in this check. The request ends up in the inactive state — see creative states.
Troubleshooting
- You cannot see a position to vote for
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You are a manager or moderator who is not a member of that position. Only owners and admins can vote on behalf of any position.
- Your approval succeeded but nothing changed
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Reviewing to the state a request is already in is a no-op. Check the current state of the request.
- The request will not accept your decision
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It has already reached a final state, or an earlier decision on it is still being processed. Refresh the request and check its state.
- Approval fails with a media error
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The file the demand partner pointed at is no longer reachable, or its content type no longer matches what was declared. Ask the demand partner to resubmit.
- An approved creative is not winning anything
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Approval makes a creative eligible; it does not make it win. Check that the face is not excluded by the scope you set, and see the auction for what else decides the outcome.