Video Ads 101: How to define them

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

Nowadays, anyone can easily claim that video content is a new trend.

Well, it shouldn’t be surprising!

Just look around at how much time people spend daily on YouTube, Tik Tok and Instagram reels. As a result, Video Ads could find their place among other types of advertisements very fast.

Just in case this hasn’t persuaded you to learn more about video advertisements, here are some other factors that make video advertisements more promising:

• First of all, video ads offer a higher engagement for advertisers. What does that mean? Users are drawn to videos because they combine sound and movement. Both of these are crucial for effectively communicating a message and increasing engagement.
• Video commercials are more effective at captivating viewers and bringing more awareness to the users than traditional banner advertising because they tell a better narrative.

Are you convinced now? let’s jump to the technical part.

How do video ads work?

You may have already experienced watching a video or a stream online, and halfway through, you are prompted with a video ad. A video ad that is sometimes skippable and sometimes not (which hurts, I know).

If a newbie (like me a year ago) jumped to the industry terms right away, he would be overwhelmed with many new terms and expressions. This is precisely where I can help you!

VAST:

The very first term to keep in mind is VAST (Video Ad Serving Template). VAST is not complex; it’s just an XML file containing all the necessary information for serving a video ad.

What kind of information? Well, let me show you an example:

<VAST version="3.0">
    <Ad id="123456">
        <InLine>
            <AdTitle>Funny video Ad!</AdTitle>
            <Error>http://example.com/error</Error>
            <Impression id="654321">http://example.com/track/impression</Impression>
            <Creatives>
                <Creative id="1234" sequence="1">
                    <Linear>
                        <Duration>00:00:15</Duration>
                        <TrackingEvents>
                            <Tracking event="start">http://example.com/tracking/start</Tracking>
                         </TrackingEvents>
                        <MediaFiles>
                            <MediaFile id="4321" delivery="progressive" type="video/mp4" bitrate="500" width="400" height="300" minBitrate="360" maxBitrate="1080" scalable="1" maintainAspectRatio="1" codec="0">
                                <![CDATA[https://static.criteo.com/ad.mp4]]>
                            </MediaFile>
                        </MediaFiles>
                    </Linear>
                </Creative>
            </Creatives>
        </InLine>
    </Ad>
</VAST>

Well, here I kept the essential tags, but it’s not limited to these.

Usually, the namings are quite intuitive and help you to figure out the role of each tag, but for example:

• <Impression> tag contains a URL, which is called when the Video ad is displayed for the user; basically, this is the moment we say an Impression is made. Why is a URL called? Because advertisers are curious about the number of impressions made by advertising agencies.
• <Creatives> tag contains the key information of the video. Its <Duration> and the <Mediafile> containing the video mp4 file are the most obvious ones.
• Within this tag are the <TrackingEvents> tags, which are the URLs invoked when a video event (e.g., start, pause, resume,..) is invoked. More in the VPAID chapter 😉

And for more examples, you could do a quick Google or have a look at the IAB GitHub repository: https://github.com/InteractiveAdvertisingBureau/VAST_Samples; you can find plenty of them here. Or you can find a Criteo VAST example here!

And now you can guess by “information” what I meant: the pricing model, Ad system, VAST version, the link to the video file to be displayed, etc.

I guess we are ready for the next term. Let’s go 🏃

VPAID:

Stands for Video Player-Ad Interface Definition. Huh? We need to state some issues or missing functionalities in VAST first.

Having a look inside a VAST, you can see a tag called: <TrackingEvents>. What is it? Well, in the AdTech industry, one of the things that have a high level of importance is the user interaction with the video ad.

Put yourself in the shoes of an advertiser; an interesting metric for you would probably be the ratio of the audience who have not clicked on the skip button of the video ad. This will give you an insight into how engaging your ad is. And it can be extended to a lot of events on a video ad: e.g. start, pause, resume, etc. Curious? Stay tuned for the following articles in the series. 😃

But What’s the point? Well, here is where those tags come into place → Criteo puts some trackers endpoint in these <Tracking> tags to catch these events from the users.

VAST has some limited capability in tracking some events:

Any interaction an audience makes can not be supported by VAST alone. VAST only supports very simple in-stream video ad formats. (in-stream: an ad displayed at the start, middle or end of a video)

These basic ad types don’t offer an engaging user experience and don’t let the advertiser get detailed information about interactions.

VPAID is added on top of VAST to provide an improved solution. A single “executable ad” (one that needs software logic to be run as part of ad playing) may be presented in-stream with the publisher’s video content in any compliant video player, thanks to VPAID’s establishment of a standard communication protocol between video players and ad units. Like this 👇

Could it be explained more simpler? Simply said, VPAID is a Javascript code served via VAST, sits on top of the video player, and catches the users’ interaction with the video ad.

What kind of interaction? The most important one is viewability. To know more about Viewability and how we measure it in Criteo, you can have a look at this article: Out of sight, out of click

Example? Well:

• A simple VAST: Link
• A VAST served with VPAID: Link

As you can notice, there are two significant differences between the tags:

• <MediaFile apiFramework="VPAID"> exists in the second ad, indicating the endpoint where VPAID is hosted.
• <AdParameters> exists in the second ad, which contains a couple of parameters that VPAID will use.

OMID:

VPAID is really good, BUT some issues about this framework have encouraged the Ad industry to introduce a new way to capture the video’s viewability.

The main issues are:

• Security problems; since VPAID needs to access the whole page to leverage the viewability,
• Clarity and simplicity with new structured standards,
• Reduced the risk of errors; since VPAID is responsible for the video playback (if VPAID fails → no Video ad at all!),
• Scalability; with OMID, advertisers can integrate as many third-party viewability measurement companies into their ads.

What is OMID all of a sudden? Let’s keep it for the next post 😅 This article is bombarding you with many new terms, but for now, let’s say VPAID is good, but OMID is way better!

The good news is that OMID is really good! It brings a more seamless video experience, but unfortunately, the support for OMID is low 😢

Why? well, the migration from VPAID to OMID was a drastic change, and the publishers still tend to stick with VPAID. Although it has been over four years since IAB deprecated VPAID, at Criteo, only ~35% of our publisher partners are currently supporting OMID.

Too many terms already, right? In the following article, we will cover more of these existing technologies at Criteo, but with a more technical point of view. 😉