Editors and designers
Create the work and move designs into In Review when they are ready. They pick which team members should review, and those reviewers get notified by email. No chasing required.
Creatopy is now The Brief.
Every ad gets reviewed before it goes live. No exceptions, no accidents, no "I thought someone checked that" conversations.
The Brief (formerly Creatopy) · 2.5M+ ads exported · 5,000+ brands and agencies · 133 countries
Your workspace admin flips the switch in workspace settings. From that point, every design follows one clear path before it can go live.
Four statuses. One flow. Zero ambiguity.
Every design moves through four statuses before it can go live. The flow is simple, visible to everyone on the team, and enforced by the platform when you need it to be.
There is a second toggle in workspace settings: Require approval before publish.
Turn it on and The Brief blocks publishing and ad serving for any design that has not reached Approved status. Try to push a design that is still In Review or in Draft, and the platform stops you. Hard gate. Nothing goes live without sign-off.
Turn it off and the statuses still work, but as labels, not locks. Your team can use Draft, In Review, and Approved to stay organized without the system blocking anything. Guidance mode vs. enforcement mode.
Most enterprise teams want the hard gate. It is the whole point. But the flexibility is there if you want to roll out gradually or run different rules across workspaces.
Open Approval History on any design and you will see exactly who changed the status, when they changed it, and what it changed from. Draft to In Review by Maria at 2:14pm. Approved by James at 4:30pm. Changes Requested by Sarah at 9:00am the next morning.
Compliance teams need this. Client sign-off records need this. And three weeks from now, when someone asks "who approved this?", there is an actual answer instead of a Slack search.
Editors and designers
Create the work and move designs into In Review when they are ready. They pick which team members should review, and those reviewers get notified by email. No chasing required.
Reviewers and approvers
Open the design, leave feedback, approve or request changes. Each reviewer acts independently. Multiple people can review the same design without stepping on each other.
Workspace admins
Enable or disable the workflow in workspace settings and choose whether approval is required before publishing. One toggle, full control.
Plenty of standalone creative approval tools exist: Ziflow, Filestage, StreamWork, PageProof, and others. Good at what they do. But they all share the same problem: they live outside your ad creation platform.
That means your designer builds a banner in one tool, exports it, uploads it to the approval tool, waits for feedback, goes back to the editor to make changes, re-exports, re-uploads, and repeats until someone hits approve. Every round-trip is friction. Every export is a version control risk.
If your team uses a dedicated proofing tool for non-ad assets like PDFs or print materials, that makes sense. But for ad creatives specifically, having approval built into the platform where ads are designed, animated, and published removes an entire layer of workflow complexity.
For years, the same question haunted every enterprise team: "How do we make sure nothing goes live without a green light?"
Until now, you relied on a messy mix of Slack threads, "final-v3" emails, and a lot of plain old trust. It was friction-heavy and, frankly, risky.
Review where the work is
No more jumping to Slack to explain a design. The context stays where the pixels are.
Automatic audit trails
Compliance shouldn't be a manual chore. Every sign-off is logged, automatically.
Hard gates, not "good habits."
When you turn on the Publish Gate, the system enforces the process. No more accidental 2:00 AM deployments.
Setup takes minutes, not days
We don't do six-month enterprise implementations. Just a quick sync to align on your workspace, and we flip the switch.
Can I turn on approval workflow for some workspaces but not others?
What happens if a design is already published and then its status changes?
Is this included in Team or Ultra plans?
Do I need separate creative approval software alongside The Brief?
Does approval workflow affect downloading designs?
Can reviewers leave comments on the design?
How do reviewers get notified?
How does this work with ad serving and direct publishing?
Can I turn on approval workflow for some workspaces but not others?
Does approval workflow affect downloading designs?
What happens if a design is already published and then its status changes?
Can reviewers leave comments on the design?
Is this included in Team or Ultra plans?
How do reviewers get notified?
Do I need separate creative approval software alongside The Brief?
How does this work with ad serving and direct publishing?
Book a quick call and we will enable approval workflow on your workspace.