Protecting Your Brand During the Flash to HTML Migration

The inevitable is finally here—it’s time for publishers to transition from Flash to HTML. This transition can seem daunting to marketers, as all major technology shakeups are, but this one comes on the heels of the recent industry call for more measurement transparency, ad fraud prevention, and brand safety—which makes this transition seem especially intricate. Marketers are now at a crossroads where they not only have to ensure their video creatives are built in HTML, but they also have to worry about protecting their brand from issues with fraud, viewability and brand safety under shifting technology standards.

The growth of HTML video ads has been happening for several years now—in fact, our recently-released 2017 Global Video Benchmarks shows that VPAID-HTML experienced the highest growth of any tag type since 2015. This is an increase of over 350% from the first half of 2016 to the second half of the same year. Furthermore, recent events such as Google discontinuing support for Flash video ads across their buy-side and sell-side platforms, have accelerated this trend. This may explain why this past June, we found that, for the first time ever, the volume of VPAID-HTML ads surpassed that of VPAID-Flash. Given this recent explosive growth, it is especially timely for marketers to be able to access solutions that protect their video investments in HTML, as well as Flash, to ensure coverage of brand safety solutions across the entirety of their media buys.

To ensure brands have this coverage, we’ve expanded our integration with one of our industry-leading verification partners, Integral Ad Science (IAS), to enable real-time ad blocking across brand safety, ad fraud and geo in HTML environments, ensuring brands can effectively reach their consumers on all video inventory. The need for verification is clear, as our benchmarks report also covered all 2016 campaigns where the integrated ad blocking solution with IAS was enabled across Flash environments, and found that ad fraud was the biggest cause of blocked impressions—contributing to 35% of all blocked impressions. Since these impressions were stopped before the ad was actually served, brands were able to re-invest those opportunities toward optimal media that effectively delivered their messaging to consumers.

Our goal, in tandem with IAS, is to ensure marketers can easily continue to protect their video investments despite the complexities presented during the shift of technology standards. We understand how important brand safety is to marketers and are working to provide a seamless solution that works for every video ad—regardless of what type of inventory is used. We are committed to ensuring the protection of brand’s video investments, so that marketers can focus on driving their business objectives and let us focus on the technical standards.

For more information around enabling our integrated solution with IAS on your video campaigns, please feel free to reach out via our website.