Advertising

Advertising Specifications

DPP technical projects often cover workflows not just for programme content, but also commercials, sponsorship, and promotions.

Our work on file-based delivery includes specifications for delivery of short-form material such as commercials, using formats in the AS-11 family. Read more...

Meanwhile our work on versioning and mastering with IMF includes work on how IMF can unlock new opportunities and efficiencies in advertising workflows, especially for addressable advertising. Read more...

These are highly active project areas, so if you'd like to get involved, please get in touch.

Commercials and Promotions

Just as with programme delivery, it’s important to have common specifications for delivery of short-form content, such as Commercials, Sponsorship and Promotional material.

UK HD Commercials, Sponsorship, Promotions, and Presentation Events

Historically in the UK, each broadcaster used their own specifications for the delivery of Commercials and Sponsorship. A unified DPP delivery specification is now available, alongside an equivalent for Promotions and Presentation Events.

AMWA AS-11 X5 and X6

AS-11 X6 has now been published by the AMWA and is in production use by broadcasters. The specification was defined by DPP members to facilitate delivery of air-ready video for short form content such as advertisements, promos, and music videos.

It is based on AVC-i 100 at 1080i50 and provides:

• embedded subtitles (IMSC1.1 or OP-47)
• advert-specific metadata
• metadata for music videos

A corresponding draft specification exists for UHD resolutions: AS-11 X5. It is ready to be finalised whenever one of our members decides to receive deliveries in UHD.

IMF for Advertising

Online advertising has changed beyond recognition over the past five years with the introduction of personalised and hyper-targeted adverts. Recently, broadcast platforms have also started to offer addressable advertising.

A DPP working group was created, comprising content, service, and technology companies, to explore how component-based workflows could bring efficiencies across the advertising supply chain.

The benefits available to the advertising workflow are summarised in our business benefits report:

Proofs of Concept

Using our previously published IMF documents as a foundation, a handful of Proofs of Concept (PoCs) were devised to answer key technical questions. The results of these were presented at the DPP Explore event in July 2020.

PoC 1 addressed the challenge of submitting multi-variant adverts to a clearance process. Registering identifiers for the clearance process in the CPL and submitting an IMF package, the UK clearing house Clearcast could process all possible versions from a single submission. Flattened transmission files were then created for those versions which were delivered to broadcasters.

This process also proved the end-to-end use of CPL metadata, according to DPP003, which was mapped into the flat files as part of the conformance process.