The IAB’s Video Player Ad-Serving Interface Definition (VPAID) establishes a common interface between video players and ad units, enabling a rich interactive in-stream ad experience.
In-stream video advertisers have two important execution goals for the delivery of their video ad campaigns:
a) provide viewers a rich ad experience, and
b) capture ad playback and user-interaction details that report on the viewed ad experience. To achieve these goals in a world without common video player functionality, advertisers would have to develop multiple specialized versions of their ad creative for every unique video player—an expensive proposition that doesn’t scale well.
The Video Ad-Serving Template (VAST), another IAB specification, provides a common ad response format for video players that enables video ads to be served across all compliant video players. However, VAST alone does not provide support for rich interactivity. VAST alone only supports relatively simple in-stream video ad formats that are not executable. These simple ad formats do not provide an interactive user experience, and do not allow the
advertiser to collect rich interaction details.
