• by Michael Tuminello , Op-Ed Contributor, November 11, 2015

Earlier this month, the IAB introduced VAST 4.0, an update to its Video Ad Serving Template. However, many organizations may not have implemented VAST 3.0 support given that most publishers are still accepting of VAST 2.0 placements.

To be fair, the new features introduced with VAST 3.0 were mainly driven and adopted by a handful of the largest publishers. This time, it’s the same big publishers driving 4.0, but the updates in this version have the potential to drive more significant change in the industry.   

The enhanced VAST 4.0 specification is intended to address in-stream stitching, or server-side ad insertion and advance LEAN principles for better user experiences by minimizing ad load times. In this instance, the publisher accepts the VAST tag on the server-side, pulls out the video, and inserts it into the video stream, and then delivers it to the audience.  

Inserting the video ads into a single active video stream rather than loading them one by one into the player, reduces the complexity of delivering ads across multiple devices as well as reduces ad load time.  

Currently, most digital video placements are loaded and managed using VPAID (Video Player-Ad Interface Definition), which makes it difficult to support server-side ad insertion. VPAID tags also enable viewability/verification, and in some cases interactivity, which has led some agencies and advertisers to insist on VPAID, rather than VAST tags in order to support this. (It’s worth noting that VPAID ads are actually delivered via VAST tag, but the industry regularly refers to these as VPAID tags.)

This existing VPAID model unfortunately does not work with in-stream-stitching because doing so would discard the verification and interactivity layer.

So as an agency or advertiser, why should you care about this?

1. VAST 4.0 allows verification and interactivity to be loaded as part of the stream-stitching model, providing a means to support verification and interactivity when streaming for mobile and live events by major broadcasters— arguably the most valuable inventory in the video ecosystem.  It also makes non-stitched desktop ads load quicker by splitting out verification/viewability calls and stopping fourth-party served ads.

2. It opens the door to greater publisher adoption of verification and interactive video. There have been challenges with some publishers not understanding what they are getting in the VPAID placement. But with VAST 4.0, breaking out verification and interactivity to their own nodes should give the publisher more confidence in the tags they receive.

3. It brings us closer to embracing a single tag that can work across multiple devices and screens. Today, the code needed to support verification and interactivity is usually device-specific. Currently the publisher selects the device-specific video from multiple media files included in the VAST document. By giving them the flexibility to also select from multiple options for verification and interactivity, it will be easier for them to support this functionality across multiple devices within one tag.

4. VAST 4.0 can reduce video latency and increase performance for mobile interactive video. The separation of the video asset from the code should make it easier to pre-load or pre-cache the video asset in cases where bandwidth is an issue.

5. The  introduction of a universal ad ID and category information to address category protection issues brings digital closer to TV.  

6. Finally, as one of the mostly widely accepted ad delivery standards in the ecosystem, VAST has great potential to evolve into a unified standard for delivering all video and advanced video creative. Adoption of VAST as the delivery mechanism for different flavors of video ads--desktop, mobile, native and OTT-- regardless of the client-side standard in place (VPAID, MRAID, proprietary or to-be-defined) gets less challenging once the video asset and other functionality have been separated.

Surely not everyone will immediately support, or need to support, VAST 4.0. It may remain the immediate concern only of the big broadcasters with stream-stitching solutions in place. However, the whole industry, especially those with an interest in verification and interactivity should see the spec as an opportunity to lay the groundwork for cross-screen delivery of next-generation video advertising. If we pay attention to this new version of VAST and contribute feedback during the public comment period over the next month, VAST 4.0 can be a step forward for the industry.