Video Advertising

Description:

Applicaster provides video advertising functionality to enable our customers to monetize their video content.

Using Applicaster’s video ad functionality requires using Applicaster’s video player or using a video player plugin which integrates with that functionality. The functionality utilizes Google’s video advertising SDK, called IMA, and can serve video ad units generated out of GAM (Google Ad Manager). You can learn about how to create such ad units from Google’s documentation here.

This document describes how to set up video ads in Applicaster2, the CMS which holds this functionality.

Directions:

App-Level

Applicaster supports video ads that can be set up on the app-level. This includes prerolls, midrolls, and postrolls.

Prerolls are displayed before the main video content renders. While the same ad unit can be put in several fields, we support granularity of serving different prerolls to different device types as well as for LIVE video vs VOD content.

• General Live Preroll iphone
• General Live Preroll ipad
• General Preroll iphone
• General Preroll ipad
• Preroll Live Android Phone
• Preroll Live Android Tablet
• Preroll Android Phone
• Preroll Android Tablet

The fields that do not contain the word “Live” serve VOD content.

You can access these fields by going to Advertiser → General → App → (expanding your particular app) → Advertiser Settings:

If you do not see the video ad fields there, you can set them up either by following the documentation here or by contacting support.

You can setup postrolls for VODs, but because live streams don’t have an end in the same technical manner as VODs, postrolls are not supported.

Finally, you can set up midrolls within VOD items as well. You can learn more about that in the video here.

Category-Level

Prerolls, midrolls, and postrolls can also be set up on a category, if your app is using Applicaster2 as a data source (where category entities and hierarchies are supported), or you are ingesting your content library into Applicaster 2 in a format which contains categories. This is currently supported for prerolls and postrolls only.

This can be set up via the “Extensions” screen for a possible backup ad unit.

• Zoom out so that you can open the folders which hold Applicaster “Categories” of content
• Categories will make up the rows, whereas types of ad units will make up the columns. Where a row correlates with a category, and video ad type (e.g. Preroll iPhone) correlates to a type of video ad, then VODs within that category will serve that type of video ad, even if a general ad unit is set up in the Advertiser section.
• Extensions cannot be used for the Home Screen, however, which will use the general preroll and postroll ad units described in the “App-Level” section.