Overview of restrictions

Restrictions are applied at the network or venue-level to prevent unwanted advertisers or creative categories from running network-wide or on specific venues. Additionally, you can set restrictions to specify when ads can run on your network or venue by setting the operating hours. This enables you to have more control over the types of ads and time in which ads can run on your screens.

Important! At this time, advertiser restrictions are not currently supported for transactions with 3rd party DSPs. Creative category restrictions for 3P DSPs are supported with a few minor differences outlined in Creative Categories Restrictions for 3P DSPs.

The following types of network and venue restrictions are available:

Restriction type Description
Operating Hours Indicate when ads can run on a network or venue. Ads cannot be served to the network or venue outside of the selected time frame.
Creative Category Prohibit or allow specific ad categories from running on the network or venue.
Advertiser Prohibit or allow specific advertisers from running on the network or venue.
Tags Prohibit or allow specific ad categories created by media owner from running on the network or venue

 Note the following about operating hour settings:

  • If operating hours exist at the network-level only, it applies to all underlying venues.
  • If operating hours exist at both the network and venue-levels, the venue-level operating hours take precedence. 

Note the following about creative category and advertiser restrictions:

  • Network-level restrictions apply to all underlying venues. For example, if a network prohibits the alcohol creative category, then all venues cannot run creatives categorized as alcohol.
  • Network restrictions always take precedence over venue restrictions. For example, if a network prohibits Advertiser A and a venue allows Advertiser A, the network restriction will take priority and the venue will not play Advertiser A.
  • Where both the network and underlying venues have restrictions set, the effect is additive.

Inventory and ad serving will take both operating hours and restrictions into account in filtering out venues that do not qualify. To learn how to apply network and venue restrictions, see Manage network and venue restrictions.

Creative Categories Restrictions for 3P DSPs

When transacting with 3P DSPs, Vistar communicates all information describing the ad opportunity using OpenRTB v2.5. While Vistar’s ad platform offers content categories for restrictions, OpenRTB uses the IAB’s contextual taxonomy for categorization, which differs from the categories made available in the ad platform. To properly communicate creative category restrictions, Vistar maps categories available in the ad platform to IAB categories before sending a list of blocked categories to the DSP. A mapping between Vistar categories and IAB categories can be found here.

Using tags to exclude specific creatives

Tags give media owners the ability to create and apply custom creative categories for networks, venues, and orders within Ad Serving. This helps them determine the exact types of ads they want to exclude from playing on venues. While the existing creative category restriction offers similar exclusion functionality, it does so on a much broader and less custom scale.

All this gives media owners the control and flexibility to label venues and orders and the ability to enforce their own restrictions against all ads.

Note: Tags must first be created within the Network Restrictions tab before they can be applied in Creative Approvals. 

Apply tags in bulk to creative approvals

Media owners can also apply custom creative categories for specific creatives that they view within creative approvals. This helps them determine the exact types of ads they want to exclude from playing on venues. While the existing creative category restriction offers similar exclusion functionality, it does so on a much broader and less custom scale.

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