Types of video and audio creatives

Video and audio line items support a variety of creative types that can play in conjunction with video or audio content. #videoandaudio #videosolutions

Jump to a specific type: Video | Overlay | Video redirect | Set-top box | Audio | Audio redirect

  Video

All content you provide to be used by Google must be according to the terms of service.

The video creative type allows you to traffic pre-rolls, mid-rolls, or post-rolls. They can either be hosted by Ad Manager or externally. Publishers enabled for cross-sell with YouTube can traffic YouTube-hosted videos.

Ad Manager-hosted assets

Externally-hosted assets

Choose to either upload a video asset or provide an asset source URL to use as your creative. The asset should be a supported format that Ad Manager automatically designates as the mezzanine file, used to transcode into all available formats and sizes. Select whether the Ad Manager-hosted video ad duration should be rounded up or down to the nearest second. Transcoding begins after a creative is saved, not immediately after upload. If your network doesn't have the option to round the duration up or down: Transcoding instead begins after a file is successfully uploaded, and may continue after the creative is saved. An upload is canceled if you leave the page or click "Save" before it's complete.

Enter externally-hosted asset URLs to be ingested into Ad Manager, with their metadata. You can add a maximum of 40 URLs, one per line, replacing any spaces in the URLs with %20. If the metadata cannot be extracted, assets are displayed in the metadata table without values. You can also enter the metadata manually into Ad Manager if automatic extraction fails. If you have multiple assets, each with a different bitrate or format, repeat these steps for each asset.

When a video ad serves to a player that uses the IMA SDK, the bitrate used is based on the quality of the viewer's network connection. You can use the IMA SDK settings to specify a bitrate.

  Overlay

The overlay creative type is an image ad that covers part of the video content as it plays. You can either upload an image file to Ad Manager or use a remote image. You can optionally configure duration, scale, and third-party tracking URLs.

Overlay creatives aren't supported for Programmatic Direct

See the available features for Programmatic Direct.

    Video redirect

The video redirect creative type is a third-party hosted ad that can contain one or more video ads and/or overlay ads. Redirect creative types require advertiser-provided VAST tags. Because the VAST tags aren't hosted by Ad Manager, reporting is not available for companion creatives for this creative type.

The duration field is required for redirects with standard or optimized pods, and is used both to validate the loaded assets, and when reporting on video length. This value is is not automatically updated if the creative duration changes.

If the difference between this value and the actual asset duration is greater than 2 seconds, a VAST error is reported (although the creative might still play properly).

If you use Campaign Manager 360, you can enter in-stream pfadx tags as the VAST tag URL.

   Set-top box

Ads for set-top boxes are inserted into cable programs within video content accessible through a cable television provider. The set-top box creative type requires an external asset ID used in the cable system, and a provider ID, which is configured by Google for your network. Contact your account manager for more information.

Set-top box creatives aren't supported for Programmatic Direct

See the available features for Programmatic Direct.

  Audio

Audio ads that play during audio content.

  Audio redirect

Audio ads that point to a third-party ad server. Requires a VAST tag provided by the advertiser.