Overview

Creative enhancements are visual upgrades that apply automatically to your existing ads on the Equativ exchange. You don't need to rebuild or re-upload creatives as Equativ adds an enhancement layer to your existing assets.

The system renders enhancements at auction time. This allows you to maintain your current workflow with existing creatives, tags, and deals while providing richer, more engaging ad experiences.

Key benefits

Creative enhancements help advertisers and curators achieve the following goals: 

• Extend creative reach: use a single creative across more placements on the Equativ exchange without building additional sizes or formats.
• Improve message clarity: add headlines and captions to help users immediately understand your offer.
• Increase attention and engagement: add dynamic elements such as headlines, tickers, or shoppable frames to capture attention and encourage interaction.
• Preserve brand safety and control: keep your original creative visible and recognizable, as enhancements don't replace or distort your ad.
• Enhance brand recall: make your brand more memorable by reinforcing visual elements across all placements.

Workflow

Equativ automatically adds Creative Enhancements during ad delivery. When a publisher sends details about a placement, the Equativ exchange logic will consider different ad types and creative sizes that can serve in this placement and send bid requests to DSPs accordingly. Given a bid response, the system checks whether the impression is eligible based on size, format, category, and opt-in status. If it is eligible, the most relevant enhancement is applied, and the enhanced ad is delivered to the user.

Enhancement categories

Creative enhancements support various templates across display, outstream, in-stream, and CTV. The following table describes the available categories. For the full list of creative enhancements, inventory and device compatibility, and availability across platforms, see the Creative enhancement compatibility matrix.

Creative enhancement safety principles

Creative enhancements follow strict product principles to ensure brand safety and campaign effectiveness.

Respect brand intent and consent

• Manual enhancements ensure a near-100% effective enhancement rate.

Preserve creative integrity

• The system never reduces the size of display creatives.
• Outstream video always maintains minimum player size thresholds.

Improve advertiser outcomes

• Enhancements are designed to increase attention, improve brand recall, and help with message comprehension. For interactive formats, they also drive engagement.
• Enhancements are expected to have a neutral or positive impact on the following key performance indicators (KPIs): CTR (Click-through rate), VCR (Video completion rate), and Viewability.

Manual and automatic activation

Creative enhancements can be activated in two ways:

• Manual activation: you explicitly configure enhancements for your campaigns. For more information, see Configure creative enhancements in Maestro.
• Automatic activation: the system applies enhancements automatically to eligible creatives running on the Equativ RTB exchange.

The right model depends on the level of control and operational scale you need.

Manual activation

With manual activation, you choose exactly which enhancements to apply and where they appear. This method is best when:

• You want full control over which creatives are enhanced.
• You have specific creative strategies that must always be respected.

You can configure manual enhancements through the Maestro interface.

Delivery impact

Enhancements are applied only when they have been explicitly configured.

For these creatives, the system qualifies only bids that are eligible for enhancement in order to maintain an approximately 100% effective enhancement rate. 

If a given impression isn’t eligible for enhancement and a manual enhancement is required, the bid response is discarded rather than serving the creative without enhancement.

Automatic activation

With automatic activation, Equativ automatically applies enhancements to eligible creatives based on their delivery in the Equativ RTB exchange. No manual configuration is required.

Enhancement types by demand

Depending on the impression type, the system applies the following enhancements:

Delivery impact

Automatic activation applies to all eligible demand and requires no UI setup. If an impression is ineligible under automatic rules, the following outcomes occur:

• If the size combination doesn’t require enhancement, the original non-enhanced creative can serve.
• If the size combination requires enhancement, the bid might be discarded.