Managing Video Advertising

Applies to Roles
Publisher, Ad Operations
Version
Brightcove 4
Modules
Advertising Module
Edition
Express, Pro, Enterprise

Brightcove allows you to use advertising to monetize your video content. Advertisers pay to have their video ads displayed along with your videos. Briefly, monetization occurs as follows:

  • Videos are produced or acquired.
  • The videos are published to your web pages.
  • When the videos are watched from your web pages, they generate video streams.
  • These video streams create available ad inventory to be sold.
  • Your Sales team sells video campaigns.
  • Once the campaigns are sold, videos that are played will make ad requests to your ad server and ads will be delivered.

Now that you have a basic understanding of how to monetize your videos, we can look at what your Advertising Operations team must do to monetize videos. The following shows Integration (Step 1) and the Ad Operations workflow (Steps 2 and 3) required to monetize videos. An overview of the primary tasks required follows the illustration.

IAB Digital Video Ad Format Compliance Seal    IAB Digital Video Ad Serving Template (VAST) Compliance Seal

Brightcove complies with guidelines issued by the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Brightcove supports the digital video ad format specification with both VAST ad formats and Brightcove ad formats. Read more about Brightcove and the IAB.

Integrating your Ad Server

The first task to be performed is integrating your ad server. During integration you set up the connection between Brightcove and your ad serving system, referred to as your ad server. (For information on why you need an ad server, click here.)

Integration is a one-time task that takes place when you first set up the connection between Brightcove and your ad server. Once you establish the initial connection to your ad server, all of your Brightcove video content can be set up to make ad calls to your ad server.
By default, Brightcove is configured to connect to DoubleClick's DART for Publishers (DFP) ad server; however, you can integrate your Brightcove players with many different ad servers or networks.

For information on the top ad servers that Brightcove works with, see the Brightcove partner alliance page.
To integrate your ad server, click here.

Setting Ad Policies

Ad policies are included in requests for ads (ad calls) that are made to your ad serving system. These policies specify the following information: The details of your ad tags, which are used to form the ad calls to your ad serving system).

When ads will be played, including whether ads will be played before, during, or after a video, and how often ads will be played.

Targeting information, which is passed in key/value pairs. The key/values pairs specify information used by the ad server to help select (or target) the appropriate ads to be played.

Ad policies are set in the Brightcove Advertising module. For information on using the Brightcove Advertising Module, click here.
For information on setting ad policies, click here.

Trafficking Ads

Trafficking ads is the process of setting up the video ads in the ad server, so that when an ad request is made to the ad server, the correct ad will be played based on the ad policies in the ad request. The details for trafficking ads for each ad server are unique. For information on trafficking ads, click here.

What's Next...

Read Before You Begin to learn about the steps you should perform before you begin integrating your ad server.

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