The online video advertising landscape is evolving swiftly, and with it, the need for increased transparency. The IAB’s new placement standards aim to address this challenge by offering a clearer framework for how online video is categorized, bought, and sold. These guidelines provide more consistent definitions for video ad placements, helping publishers package their inventory more effectively and allowing buyers to ensure their ads run exactly where and how they anticipate.
At PubMatic, we are embracing these new standards as we look to empower buyers and publishers with innovative strategies to balance transparency and performance. Here’s what you need to know and how we can help you navigate the path ahead.
Unpacking the IAB’s New Online Video Standards
The latest IAB guidelines have caused industry-wide discussion. The key updates include:
- video.plcmt: The IAB has fully adopted video.plcmt as the standard attribute for describing where a video ad will be displayed within a publisher’s content. Along with instream, this attribute describes other ways consumers are accustomed to seeing video ads: accompanying content, interstitial, and no content/standalone.
- Instream: The IAB has adopted a new, clearer definition of instream video, which covers pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll ads that are played before, during or after the streaming video content that the consumer has requested. To be considered instream, the video must be set to “sound on” by default or have explicitly clear user intent to watch. The video must be the primary focus on the page, and if the player converts to floating or sticky, subsequent ad calls should reflect this change.
- Accompanying Content: Accompanying content is now defined as pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll ads that are played before, during, or after streaming video content. The video players loads and plays before, between, or after paragraphs of text or graphical content, and starts playing only when it enters the visible screen space. Accompanying content should only start playback when entering the visible screen space and may convert to a floating or sticky player as it scrolls off the webpage.
- Interstitial: Interstitial ads are video ads that are played without video content. During playback, it must be the primary focus of the webpage and take up most of the visible screen space and cannot be scrolled out of view. This includes in-app video or slideshows.
- No Content/Standalone: The IAB has categorized no content/standalone as video ads that are played without streaming video content. This can be in placements like slideshows, native feeds, in-content, or sticky/floating players.
With these classifications, publishers can provide buyers a more accurate view into their inventory, thereby attracting new demand and driving incremental yield. Meanwhile, by ensuring they can trust where their ads run, buyers can improve campaign performance and operational efficiencies.
Our Commitment to Driving Adoption of IAB Standards
We believe in the power of standards to drive programmatic progress. As part of our commitment, we’re helping our omnichannel publishers and buyers seamlessly adopt the IAB’s new guidelines. We continue to collaborate with our publisher partners to guide them through the implementation process and have enhanced our platform to enable targeting, reporting, and forecasting for the video.plcmt signal. PubMatic’s commitment to upholding IAB standards extends to Activate, where video.plcmt helps advertisers better define the desired environment for their video ad, and to more appropriately value video inventory.
The IAB’s work to improve the technical standards used within the programmatic ecosystem is evergreen. At PubMatic, we quickly adapt to those standards so that our customers can realize the value of industry collaboration that the IAB facilitates. The recent addition of the genres and gtax attribute to oRTB 2.6 is one such initiative where industry adoption of the IAB standard will drive a more effective programmatic ecosystem and that we embrace.
Our advanced infrastructure ensures that adoption is simple. Our video curation capabilities deliver real results by optimizing campaigns while combining the best of actionable data sets and premium inventory. We add meaningful signals—like viewability, audience insights from over 100+ data and commerce partners, and bidstream data—to inventory from our network of 1,800+ publishers, creating unique curated packages that can improve ROI and outperform standard demand-side merchandising approaches.
The IAB’s updates represent a step forward in crafting a more transparent and efficient online video marketplace, and we’re here to help you stay ahead of the curve. Whether you’re a publisher adopting new standards, or a buyer seeking greater transparency and control over your video campaigns, we have you covered.
Get in touch to learn more about how our video curation solutions can help you elevate your online video strategy and succeed in today’s changing programmatic ecosystem.