We’re Leaving on a Jet Plane ✈️

Hey there smartxers,

Skimpy swimwear, snazzy shades, and the occasional socks and sandals combo. That’s right, the summer holiday season is in full swing, and it feels like everyone and their mother is heading off on their next adventure. Maxin’ and relaxin’ by the beach, hotfooting it around the city sights, or keeping things cosy on a camping trip? We don’t know about you, but we can’t quite make up our mind. There’s one option that’s really tickling our fancy though — a journey onboard smartx Airways to the dreamiest destination, the slick and shiny smartx platform. So, grab your passport and join us in the cabin, as we cruise through the latest updates.

Buckle up, multiple mid-roll settings are taking off

Now that we have support for VMAP, users can create ad playlists for long-form content. This means there are often multiple mid-roll ad breaks in one stream. To offer more granularity, we’ve added extra mid-roll settings in Supply Ad Rules so that broadcasters can define different rules for individual mid-rolls. Previously, users could only define one setting to apply to all mid-roll breaks within a stream.

Choose your (geo-targeting) destination 🌎

To make it easier for users to set up geo-targeting, we’ve optimised the process in Demand Business Rules and Forecasting. In the same way as for geo-targeting in Direct Campaigns, users no longer have to scroll through the list of regions and cities displayed in the dropdown. Instead, they can simply type the desired location into the search bar — Hawaii, Tahiti… you name it 🌴! Better still, multiple locations may also be selected. It’s worth mentioning that this update does not alter the geo-targeting combinations that can be selected and is purely a usability improvement.

Reporting widgets rerouting

Thought 50 Shades of Grey was the perfect plane read? The 50 Shades of Red once visible in our platform reporting sure give that notorious novel a run for its money. Merlot, cherry, ruby, crimson, smartclip red, smartclip dark red, pink — our reporting widgets were getting a little carried away using every shade of red for charts and visuals. We’ve added other colours to the mix so that users can actually tell the difference between each metric!

Unknown placement groups coming in to land

Your seat back is upright, and your tray table is stowed? Good, then we can fly over our next update as we begin our descent. Placement groups are often used for reporting on TV programmes. Since the placement group for new TV programmes is not always clear to begin with, these are marked as “unknown”. 

In this update, we’ve added unknown placement groups to the standard reporting so that they can be pulled with other metrics. For example, if a user enters the query “site” along with the “placement group” and “impressions”, the unknown placement groups are now also taken into account and included in the total number of impressions. Previously, “unknown” placement groups could only be reported via the unknown placements cube, which created the potential for inconsistencies in financial reports.

A spot of turbulence

Demand Contract seat selection: Previously, the seat (and we don’t mean seat F on row 11) of a Demand Contract could be changed while the contract was already running. With this update, the “Seat” field can only be selected when setting up a new contract and can no longer be changed after the contract has been created. Guess that means no swapping seats while the plane is airborne then. 

Developer and app names: In the Supply tab, under Domain Monitoring, the developer and app names are now shown in the inventory overview for each store URL.

Yours in platform updates and always choosing the window seat,

smartclip Product Marketing Team