Campaign Lifecycle

An advertising campaign is a container: it holds the booking period, the target screens, the playback strategy and one or more advertisements. Its state decides whether those ads reach screens, and which settings you are still allowed to change.

Campaign states

A campaign is in exactly one of four states.

State What it means

Draft

The campaign is being prepared. Settings can be changed freely, and nothing plays on screens.

Active

The campaign is live. Ads go out to the target screens according to its schedule and strategy.

Stopped

The campaign is paused. Playback ends, but every setting is kept and the campaign can be started again.

Archived

The campaign is closed. It stays visible in reports, but it can never run again.

State transitions

campaign-states

Draft, Active and Stopped are interchangeable: a campaign can move between any two of them in either direction. So a campaign can be pulled back into Draft while it is running, and a stopped one can go back to Draft instead of being restarted.

Archiving is the only one-way step, and it is reached from Stopped alone.

To archive a running campaign, stop it first. Archiving cannot be undone — to reuse an archived campaign, use the copy feature instead.
Filler campaigns are outside this lifecycle. Their state is fixed when they are created.

Campaigns past their end date

The end date does not change the state. A campaign whose end date has passed stays Active — it simply stops going out to screens, because delivery requires both the Active state and an end date in the future.

The campaign list offers this as a separate Completed filter, alongside the four states. It selects active campaigns whose end date is behind them, which is why a campaign can appear under Completed and Active both.

Ended campaigns are archived automatically once they have been past their end date for longer than the retention period configured for the advertiser.

To archive an ended campaign right away, archive it by hand. The end date lifts the usual "stop it first" rule, so an ended campaign can be archived from any state.

Moderation is a separate axis

The lifecycle above answers "should this campaign run". Whether its content is allowed to run is tracked separately, and a campaign carries both at once.

Moderation applies at two levels:

  • The campaign is new, approved or rejected. Rejecting a campaign stops it.

  • Each advertisement is pending, approved, blocked or suspended.

An approved campaign in the Active state still shows nothing if its ads have not cleared moderation.

Overbooking on activation

Activating a campaign checks whether the target screens have room for it in the requested period. What happens when they do not is set per advertiser, under targeting settings:

Setting Effect when screens are overbooked

Neither option enabled (default)

Activation is refused and the overbooked screens are listed. Adjust the targeting, the period or the frequency — or force activation.

Activate campaign when overbooked

The check is skipped and the campaign goes live.

Activate campaign when overbooked + Display overbooking warning

The campaign goes live and the overbooked screens are reported afterwards, as a warning rather than a refusal.
Users restricted to a screen group are checked even when the check is disabled for the organization, and where that group has a quota the refusal cannot be forced through.

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