Activation workflow
Activate activates published experiences to their paid ad platforms. A GenStudio for Performance Marketing experience is a marketing campaign component, such as an ad, that is prepared for a specific audience on a paid ad platform. Experiences for activation contain three main components:
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Media assets: Images or video in your ad experience, in file types and aspect ratios that vary by platform and format.
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Text: All forms of copy included in your ad, including headlines, body text, and call-to-action elements.
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Metadata: User-defined attributes, typically not visible to the ad audience, that enhance performance analysis, filtering, and tracking.
You prepare and approve these components in Content before activation. Activate doesn’t create or edit approved assets, headlines, or body copy. It only applies the setup each platform needs, then publishes the experience.
A single activation table can include experiences for multiple paid ad platforms and ad formats.
Connect your platform accounts
A GenStudio system manager or editor must connect the ad accounts for each paid ad platform before you can activate an experience to that platform. To see the steps for this process, see Connect paid media accounts.
Start an activation
Start an activation from one of two entry points:
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From Content: Filter to Experiences, select one or more published experiences, then click Activate on the top action bar.
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From Activate: On the Activate landing page, click + New activation. This opens the same Experience gallery, where you select experiences for activation.
In either case, search by experience name or filter by multiple channels to find the experiences you want.
If your selection includes display-format experiences, specify which display platform to use: Google Campaign Manager 360, Innovid, Amazon Ads, or The Trade Desk. Then click Start activation. For other formats, such as Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, and ChatGPT, Activate infers the platform from the experience’s channel and skips this step.
Activate then generates an activation table listing all your selected experiences.
Activate organizes the table into sub-tables by ad format and platform, for example Meta single image or LinkedIn single image. Each row represents one ad. For most platforms, such as LinkedIn, TikTok, and display platforms, an experience with multiple aspect ratios generates one row per aspect ratio; delete any rows you don’t need. Meta is the exception. A Meta ad can include multiple aspect ratios within a single ad, so a multi-aspect-ratio Meta experience still generates only one row.
Manage your activation table
Your activation table saves as a draft automatically when it opens. You can leave and resume the draft at any point before publishing.
To add more experiences to an activation table you already opened, click Add more experiences in the top right of the table. This reopens the Experience gallery so you can select additional experiences, which Activate adds to the existing table.
Add more experiences also lets you activate to more than one display platform in the same table. Display-format experiences ask you to choose a single display platform first, but you can click Add more experiences, select more display-format experiences, and choose a different display platform than the one already in your table. For example, you can add The Trade Desk ads to a table that already contains Innovid ads.
Once your table has the right experiences, configure each ad’s fields next.
Configure ad and platform setup details
Edit fields inline per row, or select multiple rows within the same format table and click Edit details on the toolbar that appears to bulk-edit those fields at once.
Approved assets, headlines, and body copy are locked and can’t be edited in the activation table, since they already went through review and approval in Content. The remaining fields can be edited, and vary by platform. Activate only shows the columns relevant to the platforms and formats you selected. Use the table below as a reference for what’s editable per platform.
Editable fields by platform
To configure platform setup fields for a group of ad formats, click Manage platform settings and edit the fields in the resulting dialog.
Each Tracking ID field is pre-filled with the experience name: the ad platform uses this value as the ad’s name or creative name for reporting and troubleshooting. Edit the value in place if you want to use something else.
To move between Tracking ID fields more quickly, use these keyboard shortcuts:
- Press Enter to open the edit field for the selected Tracking ID.
- Press the Up or Down arrow key to move to the previous or next Tracking ID field in that column.
- Press Enter again to save your edit.
Review and publish your experiences to their ad platforms
Confirm that every row shows Ready to Activate. Activate flags missing or invalid fields, incompatible calls to action, and duplicate tracking IDs as Needs Attention. When every row is ready, click Send to platforms and confirm in the publish dialog.
Activate reports each ad’s status in near real time: Pending, then Sent to platforms or Failed. If an ad fails, hover over its status to see the platform’s error. You can retry every failed ad in the table at once by clicking Try again, rather than retrying each one individually. Rows already sent to platforms are locked from resubmission and include a deep link to the ad in the destination platform’s native ad manager. Your final pre-publication review, and launching ads, happens in the destination platform’s own ad manager: Activate always delivers ads in an inactive state.
Your activation tables appear on the Activate landing page.
Supported platforms
Each paid ad platform has specific setup fields and prerequisites. Select the paid ad platform for activation guidelines: