Interra Systems' BATON automated quality control (QC) solution now supports the IAB's Video Ad Serving Template (VAST) protocol, a universal XML specification for serving digital video ads to players.
"Today's consumers are accustomed to high quality content, and they expect that experience to extend to advertising slots. Any impairment in quality of advertisements can impact the content provider's brand negatively and cause customer attrition," said Ashish Basu, vice president of global sales and business development at Interra. "VAST support in our BATON solution is important because this will allow our customers to check the quality of inserted advertisements with the same high standards. Supporting VAST is a testimony to our rapidly evolving product roadmap to address emerging market needs. We have worked closely with some of the leading broadcasters to implement this capability. This latest support will allow video service providers to maintain a superior advertisement quality leading to higher monetization."
VAST is designed for dynamic ad insertion, including rotating creatives, to present relevant, demographically targeted ads within on-demand content. BATON is designed to access rotating VAST-formatted ads from centralized ad clouds to perform QC on multiple variants of the ad content, as well as validate formats and ensure compliance with the VAST specifications. BATON offers DRM support to QC encrypted and proprietary ad content. Video service providers can compare actual audio/video properties to the metadata values specified in VAST. Metadata information is logged by BATON individually for every ad.