Vast to RTB, VAST to VAST, VAST to All: Select How to Trade

AD TECH INSIGHTS

Getting down to basics

There’s no need to go on about the technical subtleties of each protocol or explain how each one can be very important for media trading and rendering certain creatives. At the same time, we’d like to give you a little reminder of those protocols that we are going to talk about:

Video Ad Serving Template (VAST) is a video serving protocol developed by IAB. In simple words, VAST helps ad servers and video players communicate with each other to effectively serve video ads. VAST uses XML Schema as a markup language and VAST Tags are the bits of code used in this language.

Real-time bidding (oRTB) is the most commonly used protocol that automates inventory buying and selling within different programmatic auction types. RTB also offers a lot of capabilities including support of VAST types of inventory.

Step beyond the limitations of connection types

Now, let’s see how these standards can work for you. In the latest update, we’ve simplified it for our customers and made sure that those different connections “understand” each other. No need to whitelist every endpoint on the platform to create a VAST to RTB or VAST to VAST connections – media buying and selling are practically universal.

You can trade not only VAST to VAST or RTB to RTB but also in a VAST to RTB, RTB to VAST, and VAST to all ways.

After doing several tests and investigations our team has pinpointed several important nuances. We found a difference in VAST Tags performance when trading with an Open RTB endpoint, or a VAST Tag only. So we have also added a new feature on SSP and DSP sides. By using this feature you can select how/which connection type you want your VAST tag to trade with: both VAST tags and RTB endpoints, only RTB endpoints, or only VAST tags.

Here’s how you can do it in the dashboard while adding supply or demand endpoints:

dashboard to add supply or demand endpoints

Here’s how to set it up and what it means:

VAST to ALL – when you select option VAST to ALL, this will allow your tag to trade with both Open RTB endpoints and VAST tags.

VAST to RTB – when you select option VAST to RTB, this will allow your tag to trade with Open RTB endpoints only.

VAST to VAST – when you select option VAST to VAST, this will allow your tag to trade with VAST tags only.

When generating a new VAST tag, fill in the standard fields and choose the VAST connection that suits your platform.

To sum up

It is very important for the partners to maintain a consistent ad serving environment, that’s why making these standards compatible is an important step. Basically, with this important update, your marketplace becomes universal as it extends opportunities for buying and selling inventory, which increases the efficiency of your marketplace.

For any inquiries please contact your Account Manager on SmartHub platform, they will be happy to assist you.