Creative Specifications (Display)

This article provides our specifications for third-party hosted and Quantcast-hosted display assets. A list of common errors associated with these assets can be found here. 

Content Standards

• Ads with a white background must include a distinct border to clearly identify where the page ends and the advertisement begins

• The sponsor of the advertising message must be clearly identified

• Landing pages must match the offer being made in the advertisement

• Product claims, warranties, guarantees, or other assurances must comply with applicable laws and regulations

• Ad unit and landing page must have detailed disclosures as appropriate; in particular, full terms and conditions of the offer must be easily accessible on the landing page

• Quantcast reserves the right to request additional changes to submitted ads that do not comply with content standards. For any ads that are not in compliance with content standards and not revised, Quantcast reserves the right to reject the creative execution.

NOTE: Display creatives are not currently limited to the pixel sizes listed below.

Quantcast Platform-Hosted and 3rd Party-Served Creative Specifications

Quantcast requires all clients to provide SSL-compliant tags.

Top Performing IAB Sizes

Note: For HTML5, provide one zipped folder for each creative containing all assets (CSS, images, JavaScript, HTML, etc). Backup images for each are required.

Additional IAB Sizes

Note: For HTML5, provide one zipped folder for each creative containing all assets (CSS, images, JavaScript, HTML, etc). Backup images for each are required.

Accepted 3rd Party Tag Vendors:

• AdForm

• Google Rich Media

• EyeReturn

• Flashtalking

• Jivox

• Mediaplex

• Sizmek

These are supported, but require a week turnaround to enable.

Third-party impression trackers must be SSL-compliant third-party impression tracker HTML.

Note: Click tracking is not supported for blocking technologies or branded URLs.

Other vendors are also available. If your vendor is not listed above, please contact us to discuss integration.

Non-Expandable Rich Media 

Creative using Rich Media must adhere to the following specifications:

Ad Choices

• The Ad Choices icon is fully supported and added by default to all campaign creatives with an add-on fee.

• The icon measures 77×15 pixels and will be placed in the upper right-hand corner of the creative. 

In-Banner Video Creative 

The platform will automatically detect and configure third-party ad server (3PAS) In-Banner Video (IBV) creatives.

Types

• Auto-Play In-Banner Video creative

• User-Initiated In-Banner Video creative

All IAB standard sizes are supported.

Expandable Rich Media

Creative using Rich Media must adhere to the following specifications:

Notes:

Expandable formats that are produced in bespoke sizes by vendors such as JustPremium or Sublime are not supported.

When configuring/editing your Expandable Direction and Expandable Options, please note that our systems cannot detect if there are errors that may result in delivery and performance issues. 

Supported Expandable Creatives

• Expanding ads: Automatically or upon user interaction, it expands in a given direction pre-configured as a behavior of the banner ad itself (this is normally predetermined by the vendor who builds the actual ad).

• Pushdown ads: Pushdown ads won’t expand by taking over a portion of the page content, rather the ad will appear as a teaser on the webpage. Interested users can click or hover the mouse on top of it. By doing so, the ad will push down the webpage content to display fully.

• Multi-directional expanding (MDE) ads: They expand automatically or upon user interaction based on their position on the web page. For example, if the ad is placed on the right side of the page, it will automatically expand toward the left side when a user clicks on it or vice versa.

• Lightbox ads: Google Display Network (GDN) introduced them in 2013. Initially, the user sees a small ad that can be expanded by hovering or clicking on it. In the next stage, the entire screen is dimmed, and a lightbox shows the full ad with which the user can interact.

Skin Creatives

For more detailed information, see our Skin Creatives article.

Supported Vendors and Sizes

 Full List of recommended sizes:

In addition to all the above sizes, our platform supports creatives of any user-specified dimension, with a minimum of 10 pixels and a maximum of 10,000 pixels, respectively, in each dimension, to provide support for markets with different inventory sizes. Below is a full list of our recommended sizes based on the IAB specifications.

• 100x72

• 1024x768

• 120x600

• 160x600

• 1800x1000

• 1920x1200

• 180x150

• 200x200

• 250x250

• 300x1050

• 300x250

• 300x50

• 300x600

• 320x50

• 320x480

• 336x280

• 360x280

• 468x60

• 580x400

• 728x90

• 768x640

• 768x1024

• 800x250

• 970x250

• 970x90

• 980x120

• 980x240

• 250x360

• 320x320

• 930x180

• 640x300

• 300x100

• 320x100

• 320x240

Common Errors

In addition to following the creative specifications above, a validation error may surface in the UI that prevents you from saving the creative if there is an issue with the particular creative. Here are the most common errors related to display creative and how to fix them. 

The landing URL must be valid according to these conditions:

• Each URL must look like a URL, in that it must have the standard RFC 3986 format:

  scheme:[//authority]path[?query][#fragment].

• Each URL's scheme must be http or https.

• The authority/domain, path, query string, and fragment must be valid.

Uploaded File Errors:

• Creative dimensions must be between 10 and 10,000 pixels (inclusive) in each dimension. (see above)

• The image asset must not exceed the file size limit for the size of the image asset. The file size is based on the number of pixels in the image asset, i.e., width x height. (see above)

These restrictions are based on recommendations from the IAB: https://www.iab.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/IABNewAdPortfolio_LW_FixedSizeSpec.pdf

3rd-Party Tracking HTML Errors:

• Third-party tracking HTML must not contain non-ASCII characters

• Third-party tracking HTML must not start with a quotation mark

• An HTML parser parses third-party tracking HTML. If it cannot be parsed at all, the parser will fail, and this must not happen. This occurs when the third-party tracking HTML is not actually HTML.

• Third-party tracking HTML must contain one or more HTML elements/tags.

• Third-party tracking HTML must not contain any not allowed elements. This is the list of allowed elements: "script", "img", "iframe", "div", "noscript"