Towards the end of last year, my company began to notice an uptick in malicious redirects stemming from video ad units—a first for the digital media ecosystem. Specifically, scammers have begun injecting malicious redirects through VAST tags that redirect users to a fraudulent website, regardless of whether the ad was…
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You all know about the back and forth this past month that started with the extensive report the IAB Tech Lab released criticizing Google’s Privacy Sandbox. Though in all the summaries and hot-takes, video still hasn’t been getting enough attention and it’s an area that needs the most work ahead…
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I can’t imagine a lot of publishers crying at the funeral for VPAID (Video Player Ad-Serving Interface Definition), the IAB video standard meant to streamline the use of interactive elements in digital video that was hacked for a host of functions—some benign, others less so. With the arrival of IAB…
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It’s been a slow process getting the video ad industry to update from VAST 2.0 to VAST 4.0. But now that the IAB has introduced VAST 4.1, which includes major improvements over VAST 4.0, there’s a big push to get everyone to adopt, as I learned at IAB Tech Lab’s…
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While video advertising is still a growing revenue center for most digital publishers, much has changed over the last six years. Intriguing new formats such as outstream have allowed online publishers to additional inventory and new video distribution channels have provided content creators methods to inhabit new platforms and thus…
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The Video Ad Serving Template (VAST) standard was created to allow ad servers to communicate with video players. Before VAST was on the scene, ad creative had to be coded specifically to work with each proprietary player the advertiser wanted it to work with. The VAST Decoder explains more fully…
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AdMonsters is proud to introduce the Decoder series, which aims to get past the ad tech jargon and opacity to explain how the industry works in terms the masses can understand. Look for new entries every week on a variety of topics. First up: VAST, the standard that continues to…
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One of the lessons 2016 has taught us is that there's a difference between "unpredictable" and "unexpected." That's as true in digital media and ad tech as it is anywhere else. Retracing steps, you can look back and make sense of how we got here. It's just been a slightly…
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Despite the wonders of screen proliferation, everyone—advertisers and publishers alike—wants to be on the TV screen. It’s big and captivating—the TV screen sucks people in and demands their attention in a way that no desktop or mobile device can. The rise of Connected TV (CTV) and over-the-top (OTT) devices are…
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When the Media Rating Council released its updated mobile viewability specs for review last week, it didn’t hold too many surprises. The main definition of what counts as “viewable”—50% of pixels in view for one second in display, or for two seconds in video—carry over from the interim guidelines the…
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