Prioritize GAM campaigns to specific mid-roll cue points.

Use case:

Although Brid CMS is very flexible when it comes to different ad setups, there are specific setups that you may want to do/use where our system cannot help you.

For example, you may want to prioritize a specific campaign to display to a specific cue point and leave the other campaigns as is all the while doing this through GAM only. This step by step guide can help you on how to do this. In this guide we will set up such an implementation where we can force a specific GAM campaign to always display at the first mid-roll cue point and let the others take whatever is left all the while using a single exported GAM tag from GAM.

Set-up line items:

This is an example of targeting campaigns to specific mid-roll positions. This specific example shows the following set-up: one priority campaign is set to always display on the first mid-roll, while all others are distributed to other ad slots, in this case other mid-rolls.

A particularity is that the line item intended for the first midroll is targeted Video position > Any mid-roll > Mid-roll 1, and all other campaigns to all other mid-roll positions except the Mid-roll 1 position. 

Campaign 1 targeting:

Campaign 1 targeting:

Ad rule:

Doing this through GAM, use of ad rules is a necessity. The following ad rule would need to be set to make this work:
Video mid-rolls: Enable 

At fixed times: (seconds when mid-roll should be fired). The example shows 3 and 6 seconds.

Find the Ad rule targeting a specific ad unit at the bottom of the page.

In this case we set up an ad rule for mid rolls that tell the player to show a mid roll on the 3rd and 6th second of a video. This means that we want to prioritize Campaign 1 for the 3rd second position and let the other campaigns (in this case Campaign 2) to the other available ones. This will of course work for any number of que points but for simplicity sake we will use just two - 3 and 6 seconds.

Export VAST tag:

VAST tag is exported as a Google Publisher Tag for Video and Audio. 

The following three params need to be added to the tag.
&ad_rule=1

&vid_d=90000 (depends on the duration of your video)

&allcues=3,6 (seconds previously set in Ad Rule)

Ad tag sample:

https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/ads?iu=/21760922134/example.com&description_url=[description_url]&tfcd=0&npa=0&sz=300x250%7C400x300%7C640x480&gdfp_req=1&output=vast&unviewed_position_start=1&ad_rule=1&vid_d=90000&allcues=3,6&env=vp&impl=s&correlator=[timestamp]

In the CMS, the ad tag should be added in a pre-roll ad slot and not a mid-roll slot because the response of the above tag will be a VMAP response. VMAPS are essentially playlists of video ads and the Brid player needs to know in advance about the ad playlist so you need to give the player this info right at the start, or better said in the pre-roll slot.
Setting it in the pre-roll slot will NOT show an ad in the pre-roll slot unless your specific VMAP has an ad rule such that it returns pre-rolls.

Note: Make sure to use Google IMA SDK as your ad parser of choice to fully utilize VMAP ad tags and ad rules.