Digital Advertising and Creative Assets
Starting a Digital Advertising campaign has a lot of moving parts. To run any Digital Advertising campaign, you need creative assets. Many content partners have the option to run creative via “Site-Served”, using a copy of original creative assets, or by using “3rd Party Ad Tags”.
Almost all content providers will have a set of creative specifications (or ad specs) that an asset must meet to advertise within their content. Spec requirements are usually in place to provide quality control. Have you ever been watching a video on TV or Online, and the volume suddenly becomes obscenely loud and obnoxious? Or have you been on a website, and the page fails to load? Spec requirements are put in place to help avoid those issues and a bad user experience.
Site Served Creative:
Sited Served creative just means that creative assets are uploaded directly to a content provider’s Ad-Server, using their specific spec requirements.
Site Served Creative formats are typically as follows:
Display: JPG, PNG, GIF, or HTML 5 for Display
Video: .mp4 or .mov
3rd Party Tag Creative:
According to Ad Roll, “A third-party ad is a snippet of JavaScript code generated from a third-party ad server in the form of an ad tag (also known as a third party ad tag). The ad tag is a digital container that allows the ads to be displayed.” Source: Ad Roll- Third-Party Ad Tags
More information on the types of 3rd Party Ad Tags are below:
*Disclaimer: We do not own the rights to the below resources. There are other tag providers, but below are our favorite resources to reference:
VAST Tag: Google Ad Manager Help- VAST ad tag URL parameters
VPAID Tag: Google Ad Manager Help- Overview of VPAID creatives
Display Tag: Google Display and Video 360 Help- Third-party display tags
Tracking Tag: Google Campaign 360 Help- Set up an impression pixel and click tracker
It’s important to know what the creative specs are for any content partner that you hope to work with so that you do not run into any hiccups with launching. Many content partners have creative spec sheets or pages that you can read through to make sure that your assets are up to spec.
A few spec page examples are below:
