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Creative Best Practices

Patrick Glazier
  • Updated

Overview

This document will explain the best practices and potential issues when building and uploading creatives.

 

What are Creatives?

Creatives are the images or videos that are displayed as part of your advertising initiatives. They are an essential part of digital advertising initiatives and must be set up properly to achieve the best results. Improperly set-up creatives could potentially be rejected by either the Ad Operations team or our DSP’s creative audit team. Additionally, creatives could perform poorly when not they do not meet our best practice standards.

 

Creative Specifications and Requirements

To be compliant with the exchange standards and pass the creative audit, creative assets must meet set standards for creative branding and creative size, both in terms of file and dimensional size.

Each creative asset must have branding that matches the landing page with a logo, icon, or organization name. Successful digital advertising creatives usually include:

  • Image

  • Message or Promotion

  • Call-to-action

  • Landing Page URL

  • Brand URL (if applicable)

    • A Brand URL is simply another URL that is associated with an order line. Brand URL is for any client that has their creative go to a landing page that does not predominantly display their branding. This is typically used for political or advocacy campaigns.

Aside from the content within each creative, the file type, file size, and dimensional size are other important considerations when building creatives.

 

Banner Recommendations

  • We recommend using at least three of the five most common dimensions:

    • 300x250

    • 728x90

    • 320x50

    • 160x600

    • 300x600

  • The file size should be smaller than 150 KBs to optimize load times. This ensures that your advertisement loads on the screen fast enough to be seen.

  • We accept .jpg, .png, and .gif files for traditional banners and also support more advanced creative types such as HTML5s, Ad Tags, and Native Ads.

 

Video Recommendations

  • The standard video durations available via our portal are:

    • 6 seconds

    • 15 seconds

    • 30 seconds

    • 60 seconds.

      • Videos longer than 60 seconds are not recommended.

  • We accept the following file types with the maximum file size being 100 MBs. Additionally, we support VAST Tag creatives.

    • .mpg

    • .mp4

    • .m4v

    • .mov

    • .avi

 

OTT Creative Recommendations

  • Over-The-Top or (OTT) videos have a few more specifications. We accept .mp4 and .m4v file types with recommended durations between 15-30 seconds.

  • The minimum dimensions for the video need to be 720x1280

  • The bitrate should be greater than 2000 kb/s.

 

Native Creative Recommendations

  • File Types accepted for images are .jpg and .png

  • Recommended Images Sizes:

    • 1200 x 628 or 627 px (image)

    • 1.9:1 ratio

    • 600 x 600 px (icon)

    • 1:1 ratio

  • Maximum File Size:

    • < 80 kb per file is optimal

    • >100 kb per file could cause under-delivery due to loading times on the user’s browsers

 

Political Creative Recommendations

  • For political and advocacy creatives, the same guidelines for banner, video, native, and OTT apply, with one notable distinction. Each creative must also have a legible "paid for by" statement. If the political creative does not have it, it will fail to pass the audit.

 

Additional Creative Assets

El Toro also supports HTML5s, Ad Tags, and VAST Tags.

Articles about these creative types can be found below:

  • Native Ads,

  • HTML5s,

  • Ad Tags, and

  • VAST Tags.

 

Creative Audit

All creatives go through a third-party creative audit before they start serving. This is required to ensure that the creatives are compliant with all policies and are acceptable to serve. The third-party creative audit is an automated process and takes 1 business day to complete.

If you submit an order line that needs to start serving immediately or on a weekend, we can request a priority audit, this will ensure that your creative gets audited within 2 hours.

A priority audit may incur an additional cost, for more information about the additional fee, clients should contact their sales executive.

 

Need Help?

To request support, follow the steps in the article below or contact us at  and we’ll be happy to help.
Support Requests and Knowledge Base – El Toro Support Center

 

Reference Links

https://eltoro.com/creative-types/

https://eltoro.com/creative-specifications/

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