ACIF (short for: Ad Creative ID Framework) refers to IAB Tech Lab’s initiative, aimed at facilitating the more efficient tracking of video ad creatives across the supply chain.
What is ACIF?
From a technical standpoint, ACIF implies registering a video ad creative in one of the authorized registries with a unique identifier, available for tracking across the entire digital video ad campaign cycle, and its validation – in the ACIF Directory.
Namely, the information, added during the registration process, includes a brand’s/advertiser’s name, a product/service name, along with the optional metadata, like an ad campaign ID and a specific ad title.
In the online ad supply chain the two major components of the registered ID are passed in via VAST tag. In this respect, whereas in VAST 4.0 both the ad creative ID and the URL of the designated registration authority are passed via the specific <UniversalAdId> node, transferring this info in the previous VAST versions is made possible through the use of the so-called <UniversalAdId> extension.
Benefits of ACIF
Undoubtedly, one of the major benefits of using ACIF is the expanded frequency capping and competitive separation capabilities, as well as the enhanced video ad measurement options across all platforms, devices and screens, which helps achieve the more efficient video ad spend and higher ad campaign ROI.
In this respect, it’s crucial that a video ad player on publishers’ digital properties either supports VAST 4.0, or the relevant extensions (in VAST 2 & 3 versions), hence enabling their Demand partners to precisely track the newly-adopted creative ID data.
Perspectives of Adoption
Even though ACIF potentially improves digital video ad measurement across the entire supply chain, the perspectives of its industry-wide implementation are still unclear. Namely, one of the key barriers to adoption is the required ad creative registering fee, which inevitably makes it less affordable for small and mid-size advertisers/brands.
More importantly, the ACIF implementation workflow itself is rather complex and requires investment of extra operational resources to educate specialists in relevant departments on how to approach it, while also ensuring the utilized video ad technology is fully compliant with the newly-implemented updates, i.e. can detect and validate ad IDs in the designed registries in a fast and efficient manner, particularly when the Validation API is made available to the market players.