Campaign statuses and lifecycle

Every campaign has a status that tells you where it is in its life: still being built, waiting for a start date, on the air, paused, finished, or filed away. This page explains the six statuses, how a campaign moves between them, and — most importantly — what each status does to the screens in your fleet.

There is no approval step. When you press START in the campaign editor, the campaign publishes straight into a running status. Nobody has to approve it first.

The six statuses at a glance

A campaign is always in exactly one of these six statuses. The colored badge (pill) shows the current one — you see it in the table view of the Campaigns screen and at the top of each campaign’s detail page.

Badge	Status	What it means
Gray	Draft	Being built. It has never been published, so no screen plays it.
Blue	Planned	Published, but its start date is still in the future. It will go live automatically.
Teal	Active	On the air right now. Matching screens are playing it.
Amber	On pause	Was active, now paused. Screens keep playing what they had.
Red	Stopped	Finished (or stopped by you). Its content has been pulled off the screens.
Gray	Archived	Filed away. Cannot be published until you restore it.

The Status column shows the badge — here every one of the six statuses appears at once

The order above (Draft → Planned → Active → On pause → Stopped → Archived) is the natural life of a campaign. Not every campaign passes through all six.

How a campaign moves between statuses

Some moves you make yourself, from the card menu on the Campaigns screen or the status dropdown on the detail page. Others the system makes for you, based on the campaign’s schedule.

Current status	What you can do	What the system does for you
Draft	(no lifecycle actions) — open the editor and press START	—
Planned	Pause	Auto-activates at the start date
Active	Pause	Auto-stops at the end date
On pause	Resume · Stop	—
Stopped	Activate · Archive	—
Archived	Restore (back to Draft)	—

You reach these actions from a campaign’s card menu (⋮) or from the status dropdown on its detail page. A Stopped campaign, for example, offers Activate and Archive:

A stopped campaign's card menu — its lifecycle actions are Activate and Archive

On the detail page, the status pill itself is a dropdown that offers the same transitions — here a paused campaign offers Resume and Stop:

The status pill on the detail page is a dropdown — a paused campaign offers Resume and Stop

A few things to notice:

• A Draft has no lifecycle actions in the menu. A draft goes live only by opening the editor and pressing START — because starting it needs content, a schedule, and target screens, which you set there.
• Resume and Activate both take a campaign back to Active, but they read differently depending on where you came from: a paused campaign is Resumed, a stopped one is Activated, and an archived one is Restored.
• The card menu offers only this safe path. The server can technically make a few other moves (for example, a scheduled campaign auto-activating), but those are the automatic transitions in the right-hand column, not buttons you press.

What each status means on your screens

This is the part that surprises people, so it is worth being precise. Pausing is not the same as stopping.

Status	Do your screens play the campaign?
Draft	No — it was never published.
Planned	Not yet — it goes live at the start date.
Active	Yes — matching screens play it.
On pause	Yes — they keep playing what they already had. Pausing does not blank a screen.
Stopped	No — the content is pulled and the screen clears.
Archived	No — same as Stopped; the content is off the air.

Note

Pause does not blank a screen. When you pause an active campaign, the screens keep playing exactly what they were showing. Pause is for when you want to make a change and then resume, not for taking content down. To actually clear a screen, use Stop.

When you Stop (or Archive) a campaign, Media24 sends every affected screen a new, empty playlist, so the screen clears and stays clear — even if it later goes offline. Only screens that were showing this campaign are cleared; a screen that another campaign has since taken over is left alone.

Tip

Stopped campaigns bring their content back with one click. Choose Activate on a stopped campaign and Media24 automatically re-publishes its content to the matching screens — you do not have to open the editor and press START again.

Publishing: what START does

Pressing START validates the campaign and publishes it. Where it lands depends on its start date:

• If the start date is now or in the past, the campaign becomes Active immediately.
• If the start date is in the future, the campaign becomes Planned, and it will auto-activate when that date arrives.

There is no “pending approval” or “awaiting review” status. START is the only step.

Automatic transitions on schedule

Media24 watches every campaign’s schedule and moves it for you:

• A Planned campaign auto-activates at its start time.
• An Active campaign auto-stops at its end date.

In testing, a Planned campaign flipped to Active right on its start time — the background check runs about once a second, so the change is typically visible within a minute. When a campaign auto-stops at its end date, its content is pulled off the screens (the same clearing that a manual Stop does), so the screen goes blank at the end date without you doing anything.

Editing a live campaign: SAVE vs START

This is the single most important thing to understand about editing.

Caution

SAVE returns a running campaign to Draft — and your screens keep the old content until you press START. In the editor, SAVE only stores your changes as a draft revision; it does not push them to your screens. An Active, Planned, or On-pause campaign flips back to Draft when you save. Your screens keep playing the previously published content. To actually put your changes on air, press START. (A Stopped campaign is the exception — saving it leaves it Stopped.)

So the rule is simple: SAVE parks your work; START puts it on the screens.

New screens need a re-publish

Note

A screen added after a campaign was published does not receive it automatically. Media24 works out which screens a campaign goes to at the moment you publish it. If you enroll a new screen later, re-publish the campaign so it picks up the new screen. On the Campaigns screen, open the campaign’s card menu and choose Publish — that re-sends the current content to every matching screen, including the new ones.

When publishing is blocked

Two things stop a campaign from going live:

• No active subscription. At least one targeted screen must be covered by an active plan, or START fails. See Plans, trial and billing — the free trial is enough to start.
• The campaign is archived. An archived campaign cannot be published. Restore it first (which returns it to Draft), then edit and START it.

For the full list of reasons START can fail and how to fix each one, see Why START can fail in the editor reference.

See also

• Campaigns — the list, the card menu, and the detail page
• The campaign editor — build and launch a campaign
• Campaigns table view — a flat table with a Status column
• Plans, trial and billing — the subscription a publish needs
• Media plan — the campaign timeline coloured by status