Creative Formats

A creative format is the base shape of a creative asset, independent of channel.

What you can do with a creative format

• tableMeasurement Plan · Content Types
• tablePermission Plan · Preferences

Its creative formats— 8

• Single VisualOne static visual frame: photograph, illustration, graphic, diagram or rendered visual.
• Visual SequenceAn ordered multi-frame or multi-page visual experience, such as a carousel or slide sequence.
• Motion VideoTime-based visual media, with or without sound, delivered as a video experience.
• SoundTime-based sound-first media, such as narration, podcast, radio creative or branded sound.
• DocumentA fixed or downloadable reading or print artifact, such as a guide, brochure, whitepaper or presentation.
• Interactive ExperienceAn input-responsive digital experience, such as a tool, map, quiz, calculator or guided comparison.
• Branded ObjectA mark applied to a physical object that is carried, worn or given rather than read.
• TextWritten words standing as the creative themselves, with no visual, sound or document around them: a search ad, a message, a notification, the copy of a post.

Why it matters

What goes wrong without it, as the commitments that license this kind say it, each standing on its sources.

• Use external content taxonomy as a mapping, not masteryAdopting an industry taxonomy as the master buys comparability and hands over governance of the vocabulary. When the external scheme revises, local meanings move with it, and a term that carried a specific operational sense is reinterpreted by someone else's committee. A mapping keeps both: the comparison when it is wanted, and the local meaning when it is not.
  Content Taxonomy
• Keep concrete creative separate from its classificationsA creative asset is one addressable thing that exists in a system of record. Its format, the role it plays, what is visible in it and the geometry it is delivered at are all descriptions of it, and each belongs to a different vocabulary. Folded into the asset they produce a record that is part file and part category, and can be neither counted nor found.
  DCMI Metadata Terms · IAB New Ad Portfolio: Advertising Creative Guidelines
• Creative form is constrained by where it is deliveredA size is a property of a placement, not of a picture. Recorded on the asset it makes a creative look as though it has an intrinsic shape, and the constraint it was actually meeting — what a given surface supports — goes unrecorded. Stated against the surface, one asset can be delivered anywhere that supports it.
  IAB New Ad Portfolio: Advertising Creative Guidelines