How to Create a Campaign on ad:personam Self-Serve DSP

For the complete campaign setup process, refer to the Campaign Setup Guide.

Overview

A Campaign is the top-level container that groups your line items and creatives together. It defines the shared boundaries — timezone, currency, flight dates, and brand safety settings — that apply to every line item inside it.

Campaigns do not hold budget. Budget allocation happens at the line item level, giving you granular control over spending across different strategies within the same campaign. Think of a campaign as a folder: it sets the rules; the line items inside it do the actual work.

Navigate to Campaigns and click Create Campaign to get started.

Campaign Fields

Tip: The campaign's end date acts as a hard boundary — no line item can run beyond it. If a campaign performs well and you want to add new flights, you can extend the end date later.

What You Can Edit Later

After creation, only two settings can be changed:

• End date — extend or shorten your campaign flight
• Brand safety settings — enable, disable, or change presets at any time

All other fields (name, currency, start date, timezone) are locked once the campaign is saved.

Campaign Grouping Strategies

How you organise line items into campaigns has a direct impact on cost efficiency and operational clarity. Here are the main strategies:

Group by Timezone

All line items within a campaign share the same timezone. If you run campaigns across different regions, create separate campaigns for each timezone so that flight dates, daypart targeting, and reporting align correctly.

Advertiser: Acme Corp
  ├── Campaign: EMEA (Europe/Berlin)
  │     ├── Line Item: Germany Display
  │     └── Line Item: France Video
  │
  └── Campaign: North America (America/New_York)
        ├── Line Item: US Display — Prospecting
        └── Line Item: Canada Video — Brand Awareness

Group by Shared Creatives

Creatives are uploaded at the campaign level and published to line items via tags. If multiple line items need the same set of creatives, placing them in the same campaign avoids duplicating creative files.

Advertiser: Acme Corp
  └── Campaign: Summer 2026
        ├── Creative: "Summer Banner 300x250"
        ├── Creative: "Summer Banner 728x90"
        ├── Line Item: July Flight
        │     ├── Tag → "Summer Banner 300x250"
        │     └── Tag → "Summer Banner 728x90"
        └── Line Item: August Flight
              ├── Tag → "Summer Banner 300x250"
              └── Tag → "Summer Banner 728x90"

Group by Flight Period

For long-running initiatives, use one campaign as the outer container and create separate line items for each flight within it. Each line item has its own dates and budget.

Advertiser: Acme Corp
  └── Campaign: Always-On H2 2026 (Jul 1 – Dec 31)
        ├── Line Item: Q3 Flight (Jul 1 – Sep 30, €10,000)
        └── Line Item: Q4 Flight (Oct 1 – Dec 31, €15,000)

Group by Channel and Brand Safety

This is where cost efficiency matters most. Brand safety presets apply to all line items in a campaign — so mixing unrelated channel types under the same campaign can result in unnecessary data costs. See the next section for details.

Brand Safety

Enable the Brand Safety toggle during campaign creation (or at any time afterwards) to apply pre-configured content verification presets from IAS (Integral Ad Science) and DoubleVerify (DV). These presets block your ads from appearing alongside unsuitable content by flagging categories of concern before the bid is placed.

How It Works

When you enable a brand safety preset, the platform sends a list of blocked content category IDs to the ad exchange. Before each auction, the verification provider (IAS or DV) analyses the page or app where your ad would appear and classifies it against these categories. If the content matches a blocked category, the platform does not bid — your ad never appears there.

Each preset adds a data cost per impression on top of your media cost, because the verification provider charges for every classification lookup.

Block Uncategorised Content

In addition to presets, you can toggle Block Uncategorised Content to exclude pages or apps that have not been classified by the verification provider. This provides an extra layer of protection but may reduce reach on newer or less-trafficked inventory.

Available Presets

IAS Presets (~€0.056 CPM per preset)

IAS presets target specific combinations of environment and ad format. Each preset blocks the same content categories — the difference is where they apply.

IAS Brand Safety — Desktop Web Display

Blocks high-risk and moderate-risk content on desktop and mobile web for display ads.

Blocked segments:

• Adult content — high and moderate risk
• Alcohol — high and moderate risk
• Illegal downloads — high and moderate risk
• Drugs — high and moderate risk
• Hate speech — high and moderate risk
• Offensive language and controversial content — high and moderate risk
• Violence — high and moderate risk
• Unrated pages

IAS Brand Safety — Desktop Web Video

Same blocked categories as Desktop Web Display, applied to video ads on desktop and mobile web.

IAS Brand Safety — Mobile In-App Display

Same blocked categories, applied to display ads within mobile apps.

IAS Brand Safety — Mobile In-App Video

Same blocked categories, applied to video ads within mobile apps.

IAS coverage summary: All four IAS presets block the same content categories (adult, alcohol, illegal downloads, drugs, hate speech, offensive language, violence, and unrated content). Choose the preset(s) that match the environment and format of your line items.

DoubleVerify Presets (~€0.07 CPM per preset)

DoubleVerify presets cover broader verification scenarios, including fraud detection and app-quality filtering.

DoubleVerify — Web and Mobile App

The most comprehensive DV preset. Blocks a wide range of content categories across web and mobile app inventory.

Severe content (always blocked):

• Piracy and copyright infringement
• Incentivised traffic and malware
• Aggregated severe content

Individual high-risk categories:

• Adult content
• Alcohol
• Aviation disasters
• Crime
• Drug abuse
• Hate speech
• Human-made disasters
• Natural disasters
• Profanity
• Terrorism
• Tobacco
• Vehicle disasters
• Violence, death, and injuries
• Debated news and politics

Moderate content:

• Ad server and aggregated content
• Cults
• Celebrity gossip
• Gambling
• Occult
• Negative news (financial and pharmaceutical)
• Non-standard content
• Unmoderated user-generated content (UGC)

Risk tiers: Content is further classified into high, medium, and low risk tiers. This preset blocks across all three tiers for the categories listed above.

DoubleVerify — CTV and Mobile App

Designed for Connected TV and mobile app environments. Instead of blocking content topics, this preset filters by app quality signals.

Age rating avoidance:

• Unrated apps
• Everyone 4+ rated apps
• Tweens 9+ rated apps
• Teens 12+ rated apps
• Mature 17+ rated apps
• Adults Only 18+ rated apps

Star review avoidance:

• Unofficial apps
• Apps rated below 1.5 stars
• Apps rated below 2.0 stars
• Apps rated below 2.5 stars
• Apps rated below 3.0 stars
• Apps rated below 3.5 stars
• Apps rated below 4.0 stars
• Apps rated below 4.5 stars

This preset is particularly useful for CTV campaigns where content safety is determined by app store ratings rather than page-level content analysis.

DoubleVerify — Fraud and Invalid Traffic

Focused exclusively on fraud detection and invalid traffic filtering. Blocks inventory with suspicious activity patterns.

Blocked signals:

• Unknown brand suitability
• Insufficient historical statistics
• Fraud by device
• Fraud by site, app, or CTV — with thresholds from ≥2% through 100% invalid traffic

Recommendation: Consider enabling this preset on all campaigns regardless of channel type. Fraud protection is universally beneficial and the cost is justified by the budget it saves from wasted spend on non-human traffic.

Cost Optimisation: Why Campaign Grouping Matters

Brand safety presets apply to every line item in a campaign. This means that if you enable both a desktop web display preset and a mobile in-app display preset on the same campaign, every line item pays the data cost for both — even if a given line item only serves on one of those environments.

Example: Inefficient Grouping

Campaign: All Formats (brand safety: IAS Desktop Web Display + IAS Mobile In-App Display)
  ├── Line Item: Desktop Display    → pays ~€0.112 CPM (2 × €0.056)
  └── Line Item: Mobile In-App      → pays ~€0.112 CPM (2 × €0.056)

Each line item pays for both presets, even though it only needs one. Over a €10,000 budget, the unnecessary preset cost adds up to roughly €560 in wasted data fees.

Example: Efficient Grouping

Campaign: Desktop Display (brand safety: IAS Desktop Web Display)
  └── Line Item: Desktop Display    → pays ~€0.056 CPM

Campaign: Mobile In-App (brand safety: IAS Mobile In-App Display)
  └── Line Item: Mobile In-App      → pays ~€0.056 CPM

Each line item only pays for the verification it actually needs. Same brand safety coverage, half the data cost.

When Mixing Is Acceptable

If your campaign contains both desktop display and desktop video line items, enabling both IAS Desktop Web Display and IAS Desktop Web Video is reasonable — each preset covers a different format, and both operate in the same environment. The cost increase is justified because both presets are actively protecting relevant impressions.

The rule is: avoid paying for presets that have no matching line items in the campaign.

Quick Reference

Related Pages

• Campaign Setup Guide — Complete 10-step walkthrough
• Platform Overview — How advertisers, campaigns, and line items work together
• IAB Categories — Content categories used for contextual targeting