Ad Creative ID Framework (ACIF) Explained

Managing programmatic video creatives presents countless challenges for publishers, advertisers, and the platforms that support them. More specifically, the lack of a universal creative identification standard makes managing, transcoding, or reporting on programmatic video creatives an enduring nightmare for ad ops personnel, product managers, and engineers alike.

Without a way to identify the same video creative across disparate platforms, seemingly simple use cases like frequency capping or competitive separation turn into complex issues that require innovative or laborious upstream solutions that don’t work 100% of the time.

However, hope is on the horizon, with a new proposal coming out of the IAB Tech Lab: Ad Creative ID Framework (ACIF). This new proposal looks to introduce a framework that will hopefully reinvigorate the concept of a universal creative ID.

Before we jump into this proposal, let’s review why we need universal creative identifiers, and then we will review the challenges of programmatic video creative identification.

Why do we need universal creative identifiers?

When an SSP ingests a new creative from a DSP, one of the first things an SSP must do is assign a unique identifier to it. An identifier allows the creative to exist as a unique entry in a database for various reasons like reporting or creative review.

SSPs typically create a unique identifier since they cannot rely on any identifier in a VAST response to properly indicate a unique creative.

The SSP needs an ID to assign metadata to the creative entry in its system, such as who the advertiser is or what category it falls under. These pieces of information are critical to facilitate competitive separation to ensure that the same advertiser or category does not run in the same pod of ads.

SSPs creating their own creative IDs and a lack of a universal creative ID solution can lead to the following problems:

Frequency Cap Issues

A unique ID also allows a publisher to frequency cap how often any single ad appears for a user. However, if an advertiser serves the same creative from multiple demand sources, an SSP will create a unique ID for the creative for each demand source, which could allow the “same" ad to violate the frequency caps set within an SSP.

Inconsistent or incorrect metadata

SSPs are typically stuck assigning advertiser and category information themselves by inferring from signals available from the DSP or using proprietary techniques since there is no central repository to reference creative metadata.

Applying unique creative identification techniques and inferring metadata can often result in disparities of assigned metadata across ad tech vendors or incorrect metadata altogether, breaking competitive separation features.

Inability to Troubleshoot Creatives

A unique creative ID also allows publishers to identify and call out problematic video creatives to a DSP or client to fix — but if an SSP assigns its unique ID to a creative, this process becomes extremely frustrating since it makes tracking down a creative between an SSP and DSP very difficult due to differing creative IDs. This process would be much easier if an SSP, DSP, and advertiser all used a universal creative ID.

Unnecessary Transcoding for SSAI

Most CTV publishers leverage server-side ad insertion to stitch ads to content. This process requires a transcoding process beforehand, which also requires the individual identification of a video creative. If a DSP sends the same creative multiple times or from different systems, this could cause a publisher to transcode the same creative multiple times needlessly.

No Unified Creative Reporting

The lack of a single standard universal identifier tied to a creative not only causes potential issues on the supply side but can also cause headaches for advertisers and their agencies. Advertisers cannot easily compare creative performance log data across separate systems without a common identifier.

Now, let's look at the thorny problem of creative identification for SSPs.

The Creative Identification Problem

Some CTV publishers need to deal with thousands of potential programmatic creatives every day. The first step a publisher’s SSP needs to take to manage these creatives is to identify them uniquely, and this is where things can start to get dicey.

A field in VAST responses called "creative ID" sounds like it could contain a great value to uniquely identify a creative — but it's not. It's up to an ad-serving system to properly rotate this ID when the underlying media file changes, but it's not always the case. If SSPs want to ensure they identify a unique creative 100% of the time, they cannot rely on this value.

What's the best way to identify a unique creative? Look at the media file URL. The media file URL links to the literal media file (ex., https://adtechexplained.com/this-is-not-an-actual-video-file.mp4). If the media file URL changes, it's reasonable to assume the creative behind that URL has also changed. This method can prove reliable, but a key issue remains — what if an advertiser serves the same creative from separate ad-serving systems?

Any SSP following the media file URL method would observe two unique creatives, even if it is the same underlying ad behind both media files served from separate systems. They would both be assigned independent internal SSP creative IDs, and the advertiser would have no single identifier to link the reporting data between the two systems easily.

Further, how can you be sure that you are assigning the correct metadata to a creative, such as who the advertiser is or what category the creative falls under? SSPs have different methodologies for assigning this metadata — either choosing to trust what passed in bid responses (adomain and cat), inferring the information from associated click URLs in a VAST response (if they are present), or using fancy computer vision techniques or caption scanning.

The only other surefire yet mind-numbing method is hiring a team of people to watch every creative that hits your SSP and manually assigning an advertiser and category.

In its infinite wisdom, the IAB Tech Lab looked to elegantly solve the issue of creative identification by introducing the UniversalAdID element in VAST 4.0.

The IAB thought that ad-serving systems could populate this field with universal standardized creative identifiers generated from ad registry programs like AD-ID in the United States or Clearcast in the UK. One of these programs' main charges is assigning unique identifiers to creatives.

While advertisers may have found more utility with these programs in the linear world, the uptake in digital and programmatic has been lackluster. The IAB Tech Lab learned that if you build a (programmatic metadata) field, it doesn't necessarily mean they will come.

The industry reacted to VAST 4 with a big collective "meh" — with the industry collectively deciding that UniversalAdID and other VAST 4 features weren't worth the upgrade, even after multiple updates.

Without VAST 4, there is no standardized field for UniversalAdID — so the dream of widespread adoption of registry programs and passing universal creative IDs in VAST responses has faded away — until now.

What is the Ad Creative ID Framework?

The IAB Tech Lab developed the Ad Creative ID Framework (ACIF) to breathe new life into the concept of maintaining a universal creative identifier across the programmatic ecosystem.

The central concept of ACIF is to establish a framework to encourage the submission of video creatives to ad registries and standardize how ad systems can access metadata assigned to the creatives by the registries.

ACIF is a framework of multiple unique but complementary components:

1. Registering registries: Establishes a process for creative registry programs like AD-ID or Clearcast to register with the IAB Tech Lab to be listed in a directory as a creative registry and ACIF supporter and to provide info for ad tech vendors on how to validate creative IDs.

2. UniversalAdID fields: The VAST 4 element is back without VAST 4. The IAB Tech Lab introduced a new VAST addendum that details where to place UniversalAdID fields in VAST 2 and 3. These fields include a place to pass the ID a registry returns when someone registers a new video creative along with a URL of the registration authority (ex.“ad-id.org”)

3. A standardized Registry Validation API: The IAB Tech Lab has proposed a standard request/response protocol that registries need to support and a defined minimum set of metadata they need to return. This API will allow an ad tech vendor or system to call a registry's API with a creative ID and receive back metadata like advertiser, category, etc. “in a consistent manner, regardless of the registry," ensuring everyone has access to the same ad creative metadata.

Even though nothing stopped advertisers, publishers, and ad platforms from using ad registries before, the IAB Tech Lab believes that establishing a framework to transport an ID and retrieve standardized metadata may be enough to spur the adoption of universal creative IDs.

When used in conjunction, the three components of the framework could potentially solve the use cases we previously reviewed:

1. Frequency Capping across multiple systems

2. Competitive separation using standardized metadata

3. Identifying problematic creatives between SSPs and DSPs

4. Unnecessary transcoding for SSAI

5. Cross-platform creative-level reporting

However, questions remain.

Who will register the ads? Will advertisers or agencies take the extra step of registering (and paying for the registration)? Could DSPs or creative hosts take up this task as an added benefit?

Are the benefits worth it to advertisers? Since the onus is on the demand side to register, will they believe it's worth the time and trouble to register ads even though many issues with creative IDs affect the publishers and SSPs?

In the ACIF spec, the IAB Tech Lab outlines some compelling reasons for advertisers to adopt ACIF and the concept of ad registration for programmatic advertising:

Will DSPs, creative hosts, and SSPs support ACIF? DSPs or creative hosts must build a way to assign universal creative IDs to creatives and pass them in VAST responses. SSPs must build support for parsing these IDs from the new UniversalAdID fields and use them internally for various features. They will also need to build support for calling an ad registry validation API to retrieve metadata for competitive separation or other features.

The kicker to all this is that some benefits are lost unless everybody uses ACIF. For example, if an SSP receives the same creative from DSP1 and DSP2, but DSP1 supplies a universal creative ID, and DSP2 does not — then a publisher would have to transcode the same creative multiple times, and supply-side frequency capping the same creative from both DSPs together will not work.

With the introduction of ACIF, the dream of universal creative IDs lives on. However, it may stay a dream forever if advertisers don't find its potential benefits compelling enough to register their ads or encourage their tech vendors to adopt the framework.