Smarter Ad Breaks help maximize the value of your commercial breaks by combining the control of linear TV selling with the addressability of digital advertising. With this feature suite, you can customize each individual ad slot to build a personalized commercial break, enhanced with backfill functionality, so you’ll never miss an opportunity to drive optimal fill rates.
Using the Smarter Ad Breaks feature suite provides for higher monetization through enhanced yield management, time savings through seamless workflow efficiencies, greater user experience through lower ad load latency, and brand safety protections like unified competitive exclusions. Partners using Smarter Ad Breaks have seen an average revenue uplift of 50% over standard pods.
How to use Smarter Ad Breaks
Smarter Ad Breaks consists of various features that when utilized together provide control and flexibility for every single ad break.
- Personalize your ad breaks
Ad Rules define when, where and how many ad pods (and ads within that ad pod) will serve within a content stream. Seamlessly configure your pre, mid, and post rolls and choose the cue points or playback duration your ad pods will serve within the content stream. Personalize your ad pods by setting maximum duration and maximum ad load requirements. You can build different Ad Rules for different business needs and target them to specific pieces of content, devices, geography and more.
- Streamline your ad breaks
Optimized Pods allow you to specify the total pod length of an ad break (either a maximum duration or an exact duration) and let Ad Manager determine the most optimal sequence of ad spots to serve within that pod to return the greatest yield. Ad Manager selects ad spots by taking into account line item priority, ad spot duration, competitive exclusion, and max ad per pod requirements. Optimized Pods provide a seamless and efficient way to fill an ad pod, resulting in less trafficking time in the UI and a quicker ad load time for your end user.
- Optimize your ad breaks
Ad Buffet will ensure you never miss an opportunity to fill valuable ad space. Enable Ad Buffet for your Optimized Pods and there will always be an ad ready to serve in case of a serving failure.
Maximizing value with Optimized Pods
Optimized Pods streamline configuration, reduce ad load latency, and increase monetization across every ad break. Choose to simply set an ad break duration, say two minutes, and let Ad Manager determine the ideal set of ads within that ad break that yields the greatest ROI. Optimized Pods support inventory protections like frequency caps, advertiser exclusions, competitive exclusion, category exclusions, and more.
This feature functions across both reservation and programmatic deals and aims to maximize your fill rate, CPM, and revenue all while maintaining the best experience for your advertisers and end viewers.
Each ad break is further optimized with increased backfill opportunities from Google Ad Manager features, like Dynamic Allocation, additionally enhanced with fallback functionality, so you never lose valuable inventory.
Control and compliance
When you choose to program and personalize commercial breaks with Ad Manager using the Smarter Ad Breaks suite, you can be sure that every ad spot is filled with respect to the viewer experience, with a frequency cap across the pod, and with no repeated ads. It also ensures that your existing rules for advertiser compliance, exclusions, and brand safety measures are honored.