How Celtra, The Trade Desk, and Backbone Brought High-Quality Creative to the Open Web
Programmatic has become one of the most powerful ways for advertisers to reach audiences efficiently and at scale. Yet, while data-driven targeting and measurement have advanced, creative hasn’t kept up - leaving an untapped opportunity for advertisers to bring creativity and programmatic performance closer together.
Celtra, The Trade Desk, and Backbone - in collaboration with Smartwool, an outdoor performance apparel brand - came together to prove what’s possible when high-quality, interactive creative meets programmatic precision.
CHALLENGE
The Creative Gap in Programmatic
While media buying has continued to evolve, creative has yet to fully live up to its potential.
Creative production often remains manual, fragmented, and disconnected from where ads appear - resulting in campaigns that rely on static formats that fail to reflect brand quality or capture audience attention.
The result is a set of familiar industry inefficiencies:
OPPORTUNITY
Creative Excellence in Programmatic
The collaboration between Celtra and The Trade Desk, supported by Backbone’s strategic media expertise, and brought to life through Smartwool’s brand storytelling, represents a new opportunity: to bring world-class, premium creative into programmatic - making creative excellence as scalable and measurable as media.
Premium creative in this context isn’t about more animations or flashier builds. It’s about delivering thoughtful, design-led experiences - ensuring every impression feels intentional, consistent, and true to the brand.
A premium creative:
- Puts user experience first - complementing, not interrupting the environment
- Is adaptive and responsive - optimized across devices for a seamless experience
- Drives attention and interaction - converting visibility into engagement
- Is scalable, but brand consistent - maintaining design integrity across placements
This vision guided the collaboration: to show that better design, smarter execution, and tighter media-creative alignment can enhance both user experience and performance across the open web.
ACTIVATION
Creativity, Media & Performance
Together, the three partners designed and delivered a live proof point - showing how creative and media can work in sync to scale impactful ad experiences.
Celtra led the creative direction and ad experience design, ensuring distinctive, interactive formats that brought Smartwool’s authentic, outdoor-inspired brand story to life.
Each creative showcased Smartwool’s outdoor- inspired story through shoppable rich-media formats - highlighting product details and seasonal storytelling moments through elegant motion and clear design, creating an elevated experience that reflected the brand’s warmth and authenticity.
The result was creative that felt refined, encouraged interaction, and made product discovery seamless within the ad experience.
The Trade Desk ensured precision and transparency in delivery, connecting high-quality creative with the right audiences across contextually relevant inventory.
Backbone, Smartwool’s media agency, brought deep expertise in audience strategy and media approach, ensuring the creative was activated in environments aligned with Smartwool’s tone, audience, and quality standards.
RESULTS
These outcomes showed that by elevating design and user experience, advertisers can unlock better performance within the same programmatic ecosystem.
Quality Drives Performance
Across every key metric, the creative-led approach outperformed expectations:
These outcomes showed that by elevating design and user experience, advertisers can unlock better performance within the same programmatic ecosystem.
IMPACT
A Blueprint for the Industry
This collaboration proved that creative quality and programmatic scale can thrive together. By combining Celtra’s creative leadership, The Trade Desk’s precision and transparency, and Backbone’s media and audience expertise, the partners showed how high-quality, interactive creative can elevate storytelling and performance across the open web.
Building on this success, Celtra, The Trade Desk, and Backbone will continue to collaborate on future campaigns, further demonstrating the impact of premium creatives in programmatic.
