VAST 2.0

The Internet Advertising Bureau’s Video Council – the group dedicated to the promotion of online video advertising – has received the backing of publisher and broadcaster members to enforce Video Advertising Standard Templates (VAST 2.0) in the UK, to increase advertiser confidence in the medium. View those complying.

VAST 2.0 is a global initiative created by the IAB in the US, originally launched to bring greater consistency to online video planning and buying, and make the format more comparable with other media such as TV. It allows advertisers to easily run multi-site video campaigns from one point of contact, third party ad servers.

Until now, advertisers have been required to serve video adverts from each publisher, making it time consuming to run large campaigns across a large number of websites. As VAST 2.0 is implemented by more publishers, it will make it simpler to run campaigns on a multitude of sites increasing the reach of a campaign to equal the size of TV.

The initiative has already received support from UK agencies, who see the launch of better standards in online video as fundamental to its growth. Further benefits for agencies and advertisers include:

• Comparison with other media: traditional planners and buyers will be able to see how video adverts have performed against other media such as online display, as well as other pre/mid/post-roll adverts by comparing like-for-like.
• Greater reach and frequency: by making it easier for third party ad servers to connect to publishers in a standardised way, VAST 2.0 makes it far easier to run campaigns with greater reach and frequency across multiple sites. Importantly this will include non-traditional TV audiences like newspapers, magazines, portals and other websites, thus genuinely extending the reach of a video campaign.
• Unified data reporting: in addition to data from each media owner, with VAST 2.0 in place advertisers and agencies can have one report for all video activity bundled together with data from rich media, standard display and search.
• Advanced metrics: VAST 2.0 allows agencies and advertisers to not only track impression and click data via a third party ad serving solution, but also related user behaviour. This includes many new metrics to see how a user has engaged with the video placements such as calls for action on the page or if a user interacted with a companion display advert.

Companies supporting VAST 2.0

Companies so far committed to incorporating VAST 2.0 are listed below including those who are already compliant: