Integrating VPAID and MRAID for Mobile Video Ad Tracking
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current MRAID and VPAID standards do not fully support interactive mobile video ads, lacking comprehensive tracking and interaction capabilities, particularly with mobile rich media elements and accelerometer interactions, which limits visibility and tracking of video behavior for publishers and intermediaries.
Innovation Solution
The proposed solution integrates the VPAID JavaScript API framework into MRAID video creatives to provide a consistent method for raising video tracking events, allowing SDKs and publishers to track interactive video behaviors by initializing both MRAID and VPAID APIs in parallel or sequencing their initialization to prevent conflicts during video playback.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Loss of information
If both MRAID and VPAID protocols are initialized simultaneously, then comprehensive event tracking coverage is improved, but conflict conditions and initialization errors increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies preliminary action by checking whether the ad creative is VPAID-capable before initializing the VPAID protocol. This conditional initialization ensures that VPAID is only set up when necessary, preventing conflicts with MRAID while maintaining comprehensive tracking capabilities. The system proactively determines protocol requirements and initiates appropriate tracking mechanisms in advance.
2Measurement precision
If VPAID protocol is added to MRAID video ads, then video behavior tracking capability is improved, but device complexity and protocol management difficulty increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements universality by creating a unified ad serving system that can handle both MRAID and VPAID protocols through a single framework. The system uses a common event tracking infrastructure that supports both protocols, allowing the same codebase to serve diverse ad types without requiring separate management systems. This reduces overall complexity while maintaining advanced tracking capabilities.
3Loss of information
If comprehensive event tracking is implemented, then visibility into video behavior is improved, but computational resources and processing overhead increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies partial action by implementing event tracking selectively based on the ad creative's capabilities and the specific events that need monitoring. Rather than continuously tracking all possible events, the system only initiates VPAID tracking when the ad creative is VPAID-capable and only monitors events relevant to the current ad type. This approach maintains comprehensive visibility when needed while reducing computational overhead for simpler ad formats.
Data Source
AI summary
Techniques are provided for playback and event reporting of video advertisements on a user device. Two different event reporting protocols are simultaneously supported to enable application-based playback of video advertisements while collecting event information associated with the video playback. In some configurations, initialization of the event reporting protocols is serialized to avoid conflict conditions during the video playback.