via Admonsters
The IAB in the US has been working with some of the luminaries of the the online industry to try and make standards available which help the whole video advertising value chain to get along in the hope that this will allow the market to move on with technology discussions and move us forward to discussions of the creativity that the formats should allow.
Why are standards important? Without them the whole business just becomes too complicated to be worth it, with them the efficiency increases – campaigns online quicker, creatives better able to use the channel, reports more consistent and containing better data. This is a benefit for advertisers looking for the lost or dispersed TV audience, the media owners who are hoping to maximise the payback on their content and the agencies who try to deliver better results every time.
In order to make it as easy as possible – VAST (Video Ad Serving Template) makes it easy for an ad-server to deliver an ad into a player, the response from the ad-server follows a standard format to let the player know what is coming – is it linear or non-linear, will there be a companion banner, etc.
VPAID (Video Player Ad Interface Definition) makes it easy for the video player to understand how it is supposed to work while the ad is playing so that the content isn’t compromised and also tells the ad what size it needs to be to maximise the use of the space available.
Many of the large online video technology companies are involved in the development of the standards such as Freewheel, Eyewonder, DoubleClick and Eyeblaster along with the video media owners Turner, Hulu, MTV and Google. Hopefully the Digital Video Committee can keep the momentum that they have been building and get everyone along for the ride.
*As for VAUGHAN (Video Advertising’s Ungainly Group Hug Afficianado + Note-taker) – I have trademarked it but will licence it to the IAB when they run out of others. (Gag suggested by a certain Mr Philpot – now of AdForm)
