Ad management occurs when a buyer (or a representative party) submits creatives for creative approval, supply platforms approve or disapprove of those creatives, and buyers receive feedback accordingly. Before the publication of this technical standard, supply platforms have relied on proprietary methods and tools for ad management, or none at all.
This process is important for a few reasons: to ensure creatives comply with content guidelines, are malware-free, and function correctly. Creative submission is also a technical necessity for certain emerging formats such as digital out-of-home (DOOH) and programmatic TV. In an ad quality review process, analysts or automated processes check the ad’s landing page, tracking tags, text, the creative itself, and more. The exact nature of the review process is up to each supply platform. The results of these checks are made available for buying platforms to consume and modify bidding behavior accordingly.
The Programmatic Supply Chain Working Group has identified a need to standardize the creative submission and ad management process to reduce pain points for buyers and sellers in the digital advertising industry. Using a standard approach allows for ease of integration between buy-side and supply-side platforms. Supply platforms using the standardized Ad Management API gain increased control over the creatives that serve on their platforms. Both supply platforms and demand platforms benefit from increased bidding efficiency, as demand platforms can avoid invalid bids and notify customers of defects with their ads. This can unblock revenue that would otherwise be received if buyers knew that they must make adjustments. Submission of ads in advance also benefits all parties as it reduces approval delays that may exist with current workflows.
The Ad Management API specification support all major scenarios known at time of publication for both bidding and markup delivery. For bidding, this refers to whether supply platforms permit ads to serve by default (“permissive bidding”) or require explicit approval before serving (“restrictive bidding”). For markup delivery, this refers to whether the markup is included in each bid or whether bids refer to pre-uploaded markup by ID.