Campaigns

Campaigns are entities that for the same advertiser and account, that group together line items which in turn contain one or more creatives, which are each composed of one or more creative files.

That may sound like a complex hierarchy tree with many similar but different terms. Let's go over what each one of them means and how they relate to one another:

The above diagram illustrates the relationship between the aforementioned entities. They will all be described in detail below, starting from the bottom and working our way upwards.

Creative files

A creative file is an entity that describes a playable file. A playable file can be an image, video, or an HTML file. Some information about the file is stored, such as width and height in pixels, it's URL to where it resides on the almighty Internet, duration if it's a video, and more.

Creatives

A creative is a collection of creative files. Often, all of the creative files within a creative have the same content but with different parameters. For example, they may each have the same image but with different dimensions so they look right on different sized screens.

Line items

A line item, sometimes referred to as a flight, or a segment, is an entity that represents the details for where, when, how long, and many more parameters that determine the allowed play-out of an ad. For example, a line item can specify that a particular creative/creative file can only play on 1080p screens in New York City during the week of spring break 2025 and target people between the ages of 18 and 25.

Campaigns

A campaign is simply a grouping of line items. You might be thinking something along the lines of "why would you need more than one line item for a campaign? Can't you just target the things you need?". Those are great questions! Let's use a specific example to illustrate the why.

Consider the case where Advertiser, Bob Corp., comes to you with the intent to run a line item in both New York City and Brooklyn to advertise the release of their newest product, Steve-ee-Os cereal, with a budget of $200k. Well that's no problem at all. We can just create a line item that targets both of those markets. However, the CMO of Bob Corp. comes back to you and says that he's been told he has to spend $150k of the budget in NYC, and the remainder in Brooklyn. Line items don't allow you to split budget based on various targeting parameters, so to solve this we need two distinct line items associated to the same campaign: one that targets NYC with $150k budget, and another that targets Brooklyn with a $50k budget.

Setting this all up via the API

The basic idea here is that you will create entities in the opposite order than how they were defined above.