An Update to End All (Up)dates

Hey there smartxers,

We’ve spent well over a year looking ahead to the future, longing for the day that this quarantine monotony would be over. But now we can thank our lucky stars, because it looks like the end is no longer lightyears away. 

Speaking of lightyears away, we noticed that smartx users like to set the Demand Contracts and Business Rules end dates to 31 December 2099. Seems rather ambitious, eh?

Thanks to our latest platform update, there’s no need for us to get ahead of ourselves and manually set end dates so far in the future anymore. 

The Contracts and Deals of Today

As many smartxer’s know, Demand Contracts and Business Rules often have no end date, so the makeshift solution has been to set these contracts and deals to end on a date that’s ridiculously far in the future. We’re talking 78 years, all the way to 31 December 2099. There’s no need to do that anymore, as we’ve added a Status toggle to make it easier for users to determine whether their contracts and deals are active or inactive.

Demand Contracts 

Gone are the days of the End Date column showing an endless list of “12/31/2099”. We removed the Start Date and End Date columns from the Demand Contracts grid completely and replaced them with a simple Status column that indicates whether a Demand Contract is Active or Inactive. The date-selectors were also removed from the Demand Contracts editor and replaced with an activation toggle.

Now, if the Demand Contract toggle is switched to Inactive, there will be a confirmation to remind users that any associated Demand Business Rule(s) will not be eligible for delivery. 

Demand Business Rules

We included the same activation toggle in the Demand Business Rules editor, but kept the Start Date and End Date selectors. When creating a deal, the start date and end date will be filled by default with a start date on the current date and a default end date of 50 years after the start date. Users can change the default dates at any time.

Please note that there is an exception Direct Guaranteed and Programmatic Guaranteed Deals. Users will still need to actively select a start and end date for all guaranteed deals.

Transcoding Time

We’ve also been doing some fine-tuning in the Creative editor. From now on, the only transcoding/encoding services and templates that are available for each specific Creative Type and Marketplace will be displayed in the dropdown menu when setting up a creative. Better still, we’ve made sure that the transcoding service or template is automatically pre-selected if only one is available. This pre-selection applies to the smart API too.

Modernised Macro Replacement

Users will also notice some improvements to the Replacements table and Markup input field for System Template creatives. Previously, the Replacements table would only allow for macros to be replaced in the Markup field once, after users selected “Save” or “Apply”. This led to the need for a lot of inline editing in the Markup field afterwards. 
Now, macro replacements will be applied automatically with any change to the Replacement column, eliminating the need to repeatedly save/apply. Since there is no need to manually edit the markup with these changes, the field is now read-only, showing macros that have been applied in a green hue.

Minor Improvements

• Custom Extension: In the Custom Extensions tab in the Creative editor, we’ve increased the size of the input field to make it easier to enter an extension. If the area is still not big enough to accommodate the amount of code being entered, the field height will be scaled up even further.

• Manual MPD Upload for ATV: Some clients have a unique setup which requires them to perform the transcoding for VAST Video DASH creatives on their end. To make this process easier, these users can now upload the MPD file directly to smartx.

Yours in smartx updates and living in the here and now,

smartclip Product Marketing Team