Jargon Buster

Online content created by website users rather than media owners or publishers - either through reviews, blogging, podcasting or posting comments, pictures or video clips. 

VAST or ‘Video Ad-Serving Template’ provides a common ad response format for video players that enables video ads to be served on all compliant video players. This means that advertisers don’t need to integrate lots of different ad tags to be able to serve their video across multiple publishers. For more information about VAST see here.

Verticals are a subset of contextual and are used to group and categorise content that is contextually relevant to the same topic. The IAB Content Taxonomy provides a list of verticals that are widely accepted across the industry. 

The informal categorisation of the resources used to develop, publish and distribute a video game.

Allows users to watch what they want, when they want. This can be either ‘pay per view’ or a free service usually funded by advertising. All major broadcasters offer VOD such on platforms such as 40D or BBC iplayer. 

A service that allows viewers to watch video content wherever and whenever they choose, rather than at the scheduled broadcast time.

Viewability is an online advertising metric that aims to determine only impressions that had the opportunity to be seen by users. For example, if an ad is loaded at the bottom of a webpage but a user doesn't scroll down far enough to see it, that impression would not be deemed viewable. Viewability is not a measure of ad effectiveness.

In online/digital media, a served ad impression can be only be classified as a “viewable impression” if the ad meets all of the following criteria: it was contained in the viewable space of the browser window, it is in an in-focus browser tab, and it meets pre-established minimum percent of ad pixels within the viewable space and the length of time the ad is in the viewable space of the browser. It is recognized that an “opportunity to see” the ad exists with a viewable ad impression, which may or may not be the case with a served ad impression. (Source: MRC Viewable Ad Impression Measurement Guidelines Ver. 2.0)

A digital ad that had the opportunity to be seen, sometimes referred to through the traditional print media term of being “above the fold”. The current industry criteria for a standard ad unit to be considered viewable is that 50% of the canvas was within the consumer’s rendered window for a minimum of 1 second – the time required for a consumer to understand that the unit is a piece of advertising. Viewability is not a measure of ad effectiveness.