Preparing for display creatives in DCM

As you may have heard, streamlined creative types are coming to DCM. The centerpiece of this effort is the new display creative, which supports HTML5, images, and Flash. To learn more, visit our DCM user support site.

How does this affect DCM/DFA Reporting and Trafficking API users?

Part of this streamlining effort involves renaming some existing creative types. To minimize disruptions to our API users we will not be modifying any Creatives service types for currently released API versions. These types will only be updated for future API versions, beginning with the the v2.5 release. Due to this, current users may notice the following discrepancies between values returned by the DCM API, DCM UI, and DDM Reports:

API type Old UI & Report type New UI & Report type
CUSTOM_INPAGE Custom in-page Custom display
CUSTOM_INTERSTITIAL Custom interstitial Custom display interstitial
ENHANCED_BANNER Enhanced banner Display
ENHANCED_IMAGE Enhanced image Display image gallery
REDIRECT Redirect Display redirect
RICH_MEDIA_EXPANDING Rich media expanding Rich media display expanding
RICH_MEDIA_INPAGE Rich media in-page Rich media display banner
RICH_MEDIA_INPAGE_FLOATING Rich media in-page with floating Rich media display banner with floating
RICH_MEDIA_INTERSTITIAL_FLOAT Rich media floating Rich media display interstitial
RICH_MEDIA_MULTI_FLOATING Rich media multi-floating Rich media display multi-floating interstitial
VPAID_LINEAR Rich media VPAID linear VPAID linear video
VPAID_NON_LINEAR Rich media VPAID non-linear VPAID non-linear video

What can API users do now to prepare?

As you may have spotted in the table above, display creatives are actually an extension of an existing creative type: enhanced banner. In fact, all current and newly created enhanced banner creatives will map directly to this new type. Thanks to this, existing API versions already have full support for display creatives!

As display creatives replace the need to use HTML5 banner, Image, and Flash in-page creative types, support for inserting these legacy types will be removed in an upcoming API release. To prepare for this, API users are strongly encouraged to begin transitioning to the new display type now. We've updated our code examples to illustrate how current API versions can use display creatives to begin replacing these legacy types today:

Language Examples
.NET HTML 5 Banner Image Flash In-page
Java HTML 5 Banner Image Flash In-page
PHP HTML 5 Banner Image Flash In-page
Python HTML 5 Banner Image Flash In-page
Ruby HTML 5 Banner Image Flash In-page>

Questions about this or anything else DCM API related? Contact us via our support forum.