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Ad Approval Workflows

Overview

Lucit provides a comprehensive approval and content moderation system that gives operators full control over which creatives run on their screens. Operators can configure their approval workflow to match their internal processes — from fully automated to fully manual review — and can apply different trust levels to different users and data sources.

Approval Run States

Every operator account has an Approval Run State that determines the default behavior for all incoming creatives. There are four options:

State Description
Team Approved Only ads manually approved by a team member will run. All other ads queue until approved or rejected. Best when you have notifications enabled and staff available to review.
Team Approved + Auto Approver Team approvals plus any ads approved by the Lucit Auto Approver will run. Reduces manual labor while maintaining oversight.
Let the Lucit Auto Approver Decide The Auto Approver makes all approve/reject decisions automatically. If an ad is rejected, the user is notified but no reason is given.
Run All Ads All ads run automatically unless a team member manually rejects them. Use when you trust all users posting to your screens.

The Lucit Moderation Engine

Lucit's built-in moderation engine (powered by SightEngine) uses AI-based text and image recognition to evaluate every creative across the following categories:

  • Profanity
  • Offensive imagery or phrases
  • Weapons
  • Alcohol
  • Drugs
  • Nudity / Partial nudity
  • Hate symbols

Each creative image is scored and classified as Good (passing), Questionable, or Bad. This score is used to drive automatic approval decisions and to surface high-risk content for human review.

User Trust

Lucit tracks every user who has contributed to a creative and displays this list on each image. Operators can trust specific users, training the Auto Approver to approve their creatives automatically.

Important: Creatives from trusted users are only auto-approved if the Moderation Score is Good. Any questionable or bad score will queue the creative for human review regardless of trust level.

Flexible Approval Rules

Operators have fine-grained control over approval logic. For example, an operator may:

  • Auto-approve creatives generated by specific trusted data feeds (e.g., a vetted automotive inventory source)
  • Require manual review for any creative that was manually uploaded or edited by a human user
  • Trust specific app users (bots) to allow their creatives through without approval

This allows workflows to be configured per-operator, per-user, and per-data-source.

What Happens to a Creative While Pending Approval

When a creative is submitted and Team Approved is set:

  1. The creative enters a pending/queued state
  2. It does not run on screens until approved
  3. Designated ad_approver role users at the operator receive a notification
  4. The operator can view the creative in real-time in the Lucit application
  5. The operator approves or rejects the creative
  6. If approved, the creative becomes eligible to run immediately
  7. If rejected, the user who posted the creative is notified

When a creative is submitted and Team Approved + Auto Approver is set:

  1. The creative enters a pending/queued state
  2. It does not run on screens until approved
  3. IF the Auto Approver approves the ad, it is approved and will run, if NOT then it remains in a pending state until a human approver approves the ad
  4. Designated ad_approver role users at the operator receive a notification
  5. The operator can view the creative in real-time in the Lucit application
  6. The operator approves or rejects the creative
  7. If approved, the creative becomes eligible to run immediately
  8. If rejected, the user who posted the creative is notified

Auto Approver

The Auto Approver will only approve an ad under the following conditions

  1. All users who have touched the ad (Including data feeds) are marked as Trusted
  2. The ad passes all moderation quality scoring from SightEngine

Who Can Approve Ads

The ad_approver role at the agency/operator level grants users the ability to:

  • View pending creatives in the moderation queue
  • Approve or reject creatives
  • Receive notifications when new creatives require review

See the User Roles Reference for the full list of operator roles and how to assign them.

Content Security Overview

Lucit implements multiple layers of content security:

  1. Upstream screening: For data-fed content (automotive, real estate, retail), images pass through industry middleware providers (e.g., CDK Global, Homenet, COX Automotive) that run their own image recognition filters before data reaches Lucit
  2. Re-processing and secure storage: All images are re-processed and stored in Lucit's own Amazon S3 buckets
  3. HTTPS delivery: All content is served exclusively over HTTPS
  4. Immutable storage: S3 buckets are locked against image overwrites
  5. Hash validation: A secure hash is generated for every image and sent with every pull request for validation
  6. Data integrity: The full data set including image URLs is stored and hashed; this hash is checked on every request
  7. Moderation Engine: Every creative passes through the Lucit Moderation Engine before being eligible to run

Data access policy: All data within Lucit is stored with a "Deny First" policy. Access is then granted based on User Roles and User Policies. All data fed via APIs or data source feeds is automatically scoped to the account it belongs to and inherits that account's policy structure.

How to Access Approval Settings

  1. Log into the Lucit application as an operator admin
  2. Navigate to your Operator account settings
  3. Find the Approvals section to configure your Approval Run State
  4. Assign the ad_approver role to team members who should review ads