Back to blogging on this Sunday afternoon, it is real hot in India 123.8 F. What an awesome day to blog and nothing else ;-)
In this blog we're gonna be talking about two formats of VAST ads viz. Inline Ads vs Wrapper Ads.
Let's try to understand what these mean.
When you hit a VAST tag and you get a valid response; if the response contains a playable creative (for e.g. .mp4, .mov, .wmv etc.) you call it as an Inline ad.
The Inline response could be readily identified by the <Inline> element in the VAST response.
<VAST version="2.0">
<Ad id="128a6.44d74.46b3">
<InLine>
......
..
.
</InLine>
</Ad>
</VAST>
The inline response will have at least one media file in the response structure.
<MediaFiles>
</MediaFiles>
Look at the above elements. The MediaFile element contains multiple attributes such as: delivery, bitrate, height, width, type.
If the response contains more than one media file entries, the underlying difference would be the "bitrate" attribute. Ad networks provide same media file of different bitrates so that consumers are able to play the videos at various network speeds / bandwidth.
Inline ads primarily mean that when a request for ad is made to the ad-network & the ad-network has ad available in its inventory; it will supply that to the consumer. But what happens when there is no ad in the inventory.
If there is no ad in the inventory, the ad-network may look towards its partners to fill the slot/request. In such cases, you might see the VAST response contain a "wrapper" response.
Wrapper means it has wrapped something within it. Here in this case, it wraps an Inline ad. When a wrapper response is provide, instead of having an
"<InLine>" element the response would have a "<wrapper>" element.
The <wrapper> element would have a <VASTAdTagURI> element. Now, we know already that we landed in a situation where the ad-network didn't have ads so it looked towards its partners to serve ad. Hence, the <VASTAdTagURI>
will contain a prospective ad-source.
<VAST>
<Ad id="239699" >
<Wrapper>
<AdSystem>YuMe</AdSystem>
<VASTAdTagURI><![CDATA[http://rtr.innovid.com/r1.570e5ebc3a8b271.90741238;cb=3266479794119321896?dipn=deviceid&deviceid=${device_id}]]></VASTAdTagURI>
...
..
.
</Ad>
</VAST>
While implementing VAST ads to your setup, you would need to hit URI to get
an ad. The response from <VASTAdTagURI> may well be another wrapper response.
Typically, you would get a valid Inline ad in 2-3 hops. You should consider network lags while making subsequent hits and try to optimize your logic so user-experience is not impacted.
You can associated a timeout or identify how many hops your program would make before resume the actual content.
Great!!! Hope you like this small initiative. More on digital video advertising is to come in my next blogs.
Please leave your comments, queries below. You may also leave your feedback as to how you would like to improve my blogging. Thanks,
an ad. The response from <VASTAdTagURI> may well be another wrapper response.
Typically, you would get a valid Inline ad in 2-3 hops. You should consider network lags while making subsequent hits and try to optimize your logic so user-experience is not impacted.
You can associated a timeout or identify how many hops your program would make before resume the actual content.
Great!!! Hope you like this small initiative. More on digital video advertising is to come in my next blogs.
Please leave your comments, queries below. You may also leave your feedback as to how you would like to improve my blogging. Thanks,
