Overview

FreeWheel will be enhancing its creative detection logic in MRM for programmatic demand starting in mid-January 2024. This page explains the background for the change and provides technical details. 

FreeWheel's Programmatic module currently detects incoming creatives from DSP partners by parsing various fields in the bid response. As part of this update, Programmatic module’s new creative detection logic will instead use information from the final inline VAST tag containing the actual creative, including (but not limited to) media file URLs.

This enhancement will allow Programmatic module to more efficiently detect unique creatives and generate corresponding Creative External IDs, which can then be used to initiate creative approvals and other creative features. Publishers will be able to approve creatives while maintaining a high standard of quality and compliance with industry regulations.

This update also serves as the foundation for future enhancements, including creative pre-ingest for private marketplace (PMP) deals, which helps ensure publishers have adequate time to approve a creative prior to runtime. (More information on this feature will be released at a later date.)

How Are Users Affected?

No action is needed from users. Any creatives ingested using the previous logic will continue to use that same logic for creative identification, so users will not need to re-approve creatives and should not experience disruption or discontinuity in creative reporting.

Only creatives new to Programmatic module will use the new logic.  

All creative features, including creative approval, will continue to work as usual. However, following this change, the Creative External ID value (visible in reporting, the Programmatic Creative Library, and Creative Approval queue) will be displayed differentlyfor creatives new to Programmatic module.

Details of New Creative ID Detection Logic

Whenever Freewheel gets a programmatic bid, FreeWheel needs to inspect the bid and determine which creative it is using. This is needed to determine creative approval status, assign a brand/advertiser/industry to the creative, and offer reporting at the creative level. This change modifies how FreeWheel does this and provides more accurate detection of all unique creatives.

Old Logic

The current (i.e., old) logic used in Programmatic module for DSPs is often referred to as "triplet ID." With this logic, we identify unique creatives through concatenating four specific values:

1. Freewheel's internal numeric ID for the DSP;
2. the bid response campaign ID;
3. the bid response ad ID;
4. and the bid response creative ID.

For example: 5:234:234:234

Each time this value differs, the system considers it a unique creative.

This method has the drawback that, if a DSP bids with two different creatives but passes the same IDs in their bid responses, FreeWheel will not detect that the two different creatives are actually being used.

And the reverse problem may also occur, where a DSP changes one or more of the above IDs in their bids, despite the underlying creative being the same. In these cases FreeWheel may detect too many creatives, causing clients to have to approve the same creative multiple times.

New Logic

Because of the drawbacks noted in the section above, FreeWheel is moving to updated logic, where we instead use information from the inline VAST tag containing the actual creative, including, but not limited to, media file URLs. The exact information from the inline VAST tag used will vary depending on the particular creative host in use. Different creative hosts have different logic for how they construct media file URLs and populate various fields in VAST tags, so FreeWheel has configurations in place to ensure the creative ID detection logic uses the most appropriate signal for each creative host in order to detect unique creatives as accurately as possible.

With the new logic, FreeWheel no longer relies on any IDs from a DSP's bid response but, instead, only on the final inline VAST tag containing the creative itself. This means FreeWheel can avoid the issues mentioned in the previous section, ensuring FreeWheel should neither over-detect nor under-detect the number of unique creatives arriving through Programmatic module deals. For example, after the logic change, if a DSP sends two bids with different bid response creative IDs, but the underlying VAST tag is the same, FreeWheel will detect it as being the same creative.

This new logic is already in use for Partner Tags and SSPs integrated into Programmatic module. FreeWheel is now also applying this change to regular DSPs integrated into Programmatic module.

Example Syntax

After this change has been fully applied to all DSPs, the Creative External ID format for Programmatic module creatives from DSPs will display similar to the following:

5:bb6baf56221d752628502b6aa8a36a8a1658783297399601

instead of the current "triplet ID" syntax:

5:234:234:234

Edge Cases

In some rare cases, FreeWheel may fall back to the old triplet ID creative detection method. In these cases, the previous syntax (e.g.,5:234:234:234) will be used to populate the Creative External ID. The primary cause for this edge cause involves VPAID creatives, where the mediafile URL will often not be unique for each creative and, as a result, FreeWheel prefers to use the old logic.

Additional enhancements are planned for a future date where triplet ID creative detection logic will be fully deprecated, including for VPAID creatives and other edge cases.