The Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) released new Video OBA guidelines in November 2015. These guidelines apply to in-stream video advertising (pre-roll, mid-roll, post-roll), in-page and in-banner ads.
Unlike desktop standards, the video ad serving industry standards splinter. Which leads to more business and technical considerations for companies.
In light of the new video guidelines, there are major overlaps with previous desktop and mobile guidelines.
Highlights from the DAA Video OBA Guidelines
- Implement the icon where it would least conflict with the video experience.
- Take into consideration: the corner of the icon, video coloring, and other embedded calls of action.
- The icon should not “float” within a video ad.
- The icon should persist throughout the video ad.
- Still, if the user suspends the video ad to engage with an interactive element, the icon doesn’t need to be in the element.
- However, the icon should remain or re-appear when the user returns to engage with the video ad.
- If clicking on the icon opens an interstitial, the interstitial should cover less than 50% of the video.
- While the (optional) interstitial is expanded, the company can continue to play or pause the video ad.
- Finally, companies may work with publishers to place the icon adjacent to the video. And if there are technical implementations with an icon overlay.
- Implementation Options
Depending on where companies are in the chain of video ad serving and the creative formats it works with, the company has a range of implementation options.
- raw impressions/click pixels,
- flash component,
- js component,
- swf files in AS2 or AS3,
- or VAST 3.0.
Since many companies are still on VAST 2.0, it’s important to note that the DAA guidelines also recognize this as a difficulty for the industry.
“Given the diversity of video players and formats across the desktop and mobile environments, the DAA recognizes that in some cases serving a clickable Ad Marker is not possible in connection with video ads. However, when serving the Ad Marker is not possible for participating companies, the examples presented in these Guidelines are intended to help such companies deliver a consistent consumer experience.”
1 For example, video ads in VAST 2.0 format do not natively support the inclusion of a clickable Ad Marker.
TrustArc has seen many businesses approach the implementation differently.
Buy-side companies often require the icon by contract with their video partners. This aligns with the push to include the notice where it makes most technical sense while the industry evolves to a scalable implementation standard.
Networks that have native ad servers tend to pick one of the technical implementations above and apply them across all their inventory and campaigns.
Privacy Protection Paramount Regardless of Format and Platform
Despite these technical challenges, video advertising is increasing in popularity within the ecosystem across desktop, mobile and smart tv.
The video DAA guidelines serve as a reminder to offer consumer choice in video. Notice and choice are vital to protecting a user’s privacy no matter the format and platform.
TrustArc has supported a video OBA solution since 2012 and is able to support all possible ways of integrating the icon into a video ad.
If you are serving behaviorally targeted video advertising and want to implement the OBA icon in your video ads, please contact us today.
