Ad optimization ᴮᴱᵀᴬ

A first-time viewer, a returning subscriber, and a viewer watching a tentpole event may each call for a different advertising experience. Delivering those experiences traditionally requires application logic or separate playback implementations, making it difficult to adjust ad pressure, test new experiences, or respond to changes in audience and content.

Ad optimization moves this decision-making server-side. Using signals from the server-side ad insertion (SSAI) request, media metadata, and other sources, you can define audience segments and determine the advertising outcome each segment receives. For every outcome, you can assign ad configs, control bumper behavior, and select a stitch mode without changing your video application.

This allows you to adapt monetization while protecting the viewing experience. You can test different ad experiences, respond to the context of each request, and measure segment performance before refining how traffic is distributed.

Ad optimization enables you to:

• Apply a default ad config when no advertising segment matches
• Split a segment's traffic across multiple ad configs
• Control segment priority by arranging segments in evaluation order
• Manage advertising, bumper, and stitch-mode segments independently

Using ad optimization, you can achieve the following outcomes:

• Deliver a lighter ad load to new viewers
• Select an ad experience based on content or a scheduled time period
• Use just-in-time (JIT) stitching for compatible devices
• Enable or disable bumpers for specific audiences

How ad optimization works

An ad optimization experience contains a default advertising segment and any audience segments you create.

When an SSAI manifest request includes an ad optimization ID, JWX handles the experience as follows:

1. JWX evaluates audience segments from highest to lowest priority.
2. For each area of the experience, JWX checks the segment conditions against the request and media data.
3. When a segment matches, JWX applies the ad config, bumper behavior, or stitch mode defined for that segment.
4. If no advertising segment matches, JWX applies the default advertising segment.
5. JWX stitches and returns the resulting SSAI manifest.

Each audience segment contains one or more conditions. All conditions in the segment must be true for the segment to match. Conditions can use values such as:

• Query parameters
• Media metadata
• Date and time
• Location
• Device type
• Platform
• Browser
• Referrer

Getting started

To get started, create an ad optimization experience. Define the default ad config, create audience segments and their conditions, then configure the ad outcome for each segment.

After creating an experience, copy its ID and pass it as the ad_config_id value in an SSAI manifest request. You can then manage the experience to adjust segment priority, conditions, traffic splits, bumpers, and stitch modes.