Adding a Click-through URL to an Ad Creative

Video Cloud players support SWF ads that use ActionScript 2 and are compiled for either Flash 8 or Flash 9. This topic describes how to add a click-through URL to an ad creative that uses ActionScript 2.  Video Cloud  players do not yet support SWF ads that use ActionScript 3.

Enabling Your ActionScript 2/Flash 8 or Flash 9 Ad Creative to Click Through

To enable your ActionScript 2/Flash 8 or Flash 9 creative to click through, follow the instructions for one of the options listed below:

Option 1:

1. Add an invisible button over the stage, making the entire area of the banner or overlay clickable.
2. Attach the following getURL() call to the button's release event. One option is to add the code to the button itself:

   on (release){ 
       getURL(clickTag, "_blank");
   }
   

Option 2:

Name the button instance and attach the onRelease handler through code.

In the following example, the button has been given the instance name clickTag_bn in the Flash IDE properties panel. This code would then be placed on the button's parent timeline:

clickTag_bn.onRelease = function(){
    getURL(clickTag, "_blank");
};

In both of these cases, the clickTag argument will be undefined at the time of compiling, but will be populated dynamically with a value at run-time by the Video Cloud player. This allows the click-through URL to be modified at any time during a campaign, as opposed to hard-coding the URL in the SWF file. The second parameter of the getURL() command ("_blank") is required as it ensures that the URL call will be made in a new browser window and the Video Cloud player experience will not be disturbed. Note that the name of the clickTag argument is not case-sensitive; Video Cloud can handle other case variations such as clicktag or ClickTag.

Using this code allows for much easier trafficking of a click-through URL. To add this code, you can apply the first sample directly to the button (typically covering the stage), or add the second sample to frame 5 of the "code" layer of the Flash 9 or Flash 8 templates provided by Video Cloud.