M+E Daily
Experts Tackle Advantages of VAST 4.0
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If you need an idea of how important the Video Ad Serving Template (VAST) — the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) standard for structuring ad tags for moving ads to video players — is to media companies, just listen to Jonathan Watkins, video partner manager for Microsoft.
Speaking at the March 16 Metadata Madness event in New York, he and other experts shared how important the latest incarnation of the standard — VAST 4.0 — is to everyone’s bottom line.
VAST 4.0 gives publishers and ad vendors a way to separate video files from their interactive components, ensuring ads play in systems that can’t handle the interactive components. It also allows for better quality control for players that aren’t programmed to handle IAB Video Player-Ad Interface Definition (VPAID), and also includes the requirement of Ad-ID identifiers.
Before VAST first arrived, there was a lot of operational overhead to handle the data associated with ads, Watkins said, and now with VAST 4.0, things are going to become even easier for matching content with ads.
Julian Zilberbrand, EVP of audience science for Viacom, said there’s no need to force anyone in the industry to adopt VAST 4.0. Companies will do it because it just makes sense.
“As you move to a new standard, we see that Viacom’s consumers are all over the map, in terms of where they’re consuming our content, tablets, OTT, etc.,” he said. “To have a single standard to deploy across all those environments is … important.”
Harold Geller, chief growth officer for Advertising Digital Identification, LLC (Ad-ID), called metadata “the center of everything digital,” and Amit Shetty, director of product for video and audio for the IAB Tech Lab, called it a huge “step forward” for server-side ad insertion. VAST 4.0 also provides guidance on offering, ready-to-serve video files, ensuring that linear video ads play without fail..
Mitchell Weinstein, SVP and director of ad operations for IPG Mediabrands, said companies will quickly latch on to VAST 4.0 — possibly by the end of the year — because the advantages are obvious.
“For us it’s about consistency of data, [which is] important for interactive active features,” Weinstein said. “VAST 4.0 will deliver that data more efficiently.”
