Below is a summary of best practices for creative execution. Note that all creatives must be approved by the media owner in their Vistar SSP seat before a campaign is qualified to deliver impressions.
All creatives are sent to Vistar in the bidstream once the campaign is activated. We do not accept emailed creatives.
How does Vistar Creative Approval work?
DSPs that haven’t yet built support for the Vistar Creative API will have to submit creatives in the bidsteam for approval. This means that the relevant inventory must be making active Bid Requests to the DSP, and the DSP must be bidding back with the creatives in their Bid Responses. Upon receiving a bid from the DSP, Vistar’s SSP will pull the creative into the appropriate media owner’s approval queue so that they can review and approve it to serve on their inventory.
Identifying the Correct Creative Specs
Pre-RFPs: For a general overview on what types of assets and formats are accepted, you can use this dashboard that is updated once per month. This provides a high level overview of most formats that are accepted in digital out of home (DOOH).
During RFPs: For specs broken out by specific plans, media owners, and/or campaigns, Vistar’s Deal Desk (dealdesk@vistarmedia.com) will provide you with specs by venue type and media owner. This output should be used as the source of truth for correct specs.
Note:
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- In place of receiving specs from Vistar’s Deal Desk, media owners can also reach out to provide you with an export of the necessary creative specs when they create a Deal ID in the Vistar UI.
Creative Requirements and Support
Images
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- Vistar recommends that buyers provide JPEG files for any images and not PNG.
- Vistar requires that all images are hosted by the DSP and passed to us within the bid response in the iURL field.
- Buyers should provide creatives that match the sizes passed in bid requests. These sizes are consistent with the sizes provided in the venue drop.
Videos
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- Vistar only supports VAST for video file delivery and a maximum of one redirect to the video asset in the tag. This is enforced to mitigate issues such as latency when serving the creative.
- Once the asset is served, completion rates are automatically assigned to 100%. Quartiles do not apply to digital out of home.
Note that Vistar does not accept HTML5 assets, or DCM tags.
Resizing
1. Automated Creative Resizing
Vistar makes an effort to simplify the creative sizes that a buyer is required to provide. For the various sizes passed by media owners in their bid requests, Vistar will roll those resolutions into “standard” resolutions, listed below:
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- 9:16 – 1080x1920
- 4:3 – 1280x960
- 16:9 – 1920x1080
- Poster – 840x400
- Bulletin – 1400x400
Note:
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- Please use Vistar-provided creative specs as the source of truth, or ask the media owner to provide you with a “Deal Summary Export” from the Deals view in Vistar’s SSP, which will list the necessary specs.
- When Vistar receives creatives from a buyer either bidstream or through the creative approval API, we may letterbox them in order to expand the reach of screens that they can serve on. Similar to resizing, our letterboxing capability also helps to consolidate the number of creative sizes that a buyer needs to provide in order for their campaign to serve on the various screens available.
2. Resizing services through Vistar’s Deal Desk
For any creative with non-standard specifications, Vistar is able to provide resized assets that can be repurposed for other DOOH formats. Note that:
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- Vistar requests layered PSD files and your brand fonts (if applicable).
- Requests to provide or resize video assets are evaluated on a case by case basis as this is dependent on the nature of the asset(s) you provide.
- The turnaround time to provide resized assets is 5 business days from asset receipt.