Prebid Universal Creative

Overview

The Prebid Universal Creative (PUC) is a collection of rendering routines that can pull a particular ad ID from Prebid’s cache and do the right thing to display it. The scripts are generally entered into the ad server for when a Prebid ad has won the auction. There are a number of use cases:

Use Case PUC file Alternate Approach
web banner: iframe creative.js Banner and Outstream Video iframes
web banner: safeframe creative.js Banner Safeframes
web outstream video: iframe creative.js Banner and Outstream Video iframes
web outstream video: safeframe n/a Outstream renderers each choose where to render differently, but none writes to the safeframe.
AMP banner: always safeframe creative.js n/a
native: iframe native-render.js n/a
native: safeframe native-render.js n/a

The Prebid Universal Creative is the simplest approach for publishers to configure Prebid in their ad server. The PUC provides a creative configuration that can be used across several formats, platforms, devices, and ad servers.

Here are the features of the PUC in various scenarios:

What the PUC does for Web iframe Banners/Outstream

  1. Simply calls the Prebid.js renderAd function

What the PUC does for Web Safeframe Banners

  1. Calls PostMessage to get the winning ad from Prebid.js
  2. Creates an iframe of the appropriate size and displays the winning ad within it

What the PUC does for AMP and Mobile Apps

  1. Updates the size of the iframe to the size of the winning ad.
  2. Retrieves the body of the creative from Prebid Cache based on the UUID
  3. If the ‘burl’ parameter is present, creates a tracking pixel. Includes special support for triggering the viewable billing url for mobile MRAID creatives.
  4. If the ‘nurl’ parameter is present, creates the appropriate HTML to fire the notice URL.
  5. If the ‘wurl’ parameter is present, creates a tracking pixel. This is needed for Programmatic Guaranteed support.
  6. Resolves any ${AUCTION_PRICE} macro in the creative body.

What the PUC does for Native

  1. Retrieves the native attributes from the winning ad.
  2. Coordinates the rendering of the native ad using the template method specified by the publisher.

Alternate Approaches

Some publishers prefer to not load the extra creative.js code at render time due to a tiny but measurable impact on measurement discrepancies.

While Prebid recommends the use of creative.js because we regularly add features and fix bugs, publishers may choose to hardcode the functionality into their ad server creatives.

They would do this differently for each of the scenarios below.

Alternate method for Banner and Outstream Video iframes

If you only ever need to display non-safeframed banner and outstream-video creatives, you may use the simple approach of just calling the Prebid.js renderAd function directly:

<script> var w = window; for (i = 0; i < 10; i++) { w = w.parent; if (w.pbjs) { try { w.pbjs.renderAd(document, '%%PATTERN:hb_adid%%'); break; } catch (e) { continue; } } } </script>

Alternate Method for Banner Safeframes

See the example at https://github.com/prebid/Prebid.js/blob/master/integrationExamples/gpt/x-domain/creative.html

This is basically just part of the PUC that’s been isolated to be standalone.

More Information

AMP

Mobile App

Native

AppNexus Publisher Adserver

Other