Define Industry Standard Mechanism for Verifying SIVIC Execution

[graphicdeveloper]

The SIVIC working group call on 2/14/19 discussed the need to define a mechanism by which the execution of a SIVIC Interactive Creative will be tracked and verified. As of yet the group has no proposal. Conversation touched on the notion that this may be appropriate for OMID. It may also be that non-OMID-enabled players require a different solution.

Perhaps a single message from Player to SIVIC Creative that includes an Ad Session ID could serve to correlate execution pixels sent by both the Player and the Creative? Maybe the [TRANSACTIONID] macro value would work, or maybe a new macro / tracking event should be added to VAST 4.1.x?

Bottom line - it's predictable that marketers will complain about paying a SIVIC impression price if they can't verify that the SIVIC Interactive Creative executed in addition to the video file (otherwise it's just a VAST Media ad, right?). We should put our collective wisdom to use in solving this before the final roll out of SIVIC 1.0.

[gasperk]

Companion ads (which are similar to SIVIC overlay in that they are a separate piece of content that gets loaded independently and is managed by the player) have one tracking event defined in VAST: creativeView. We should at least do that one, but I think we can go further and define a more flexible model that can support any interactive-file events in VAST.

InteractiveCreativeFile
  TrackingEvents
    Tracking event=...

This gives us a model to support any tracking event, but I'd consider these for start:

• loaded: VAST 4.1 introduced this for video, it might be useful to have a counterpart for the interactive piece). Not sure when to track this, maybe on init resolve
• view (or render or whatever), track this on startCreative-resolve

[ryanthompson591]

See also #210

[graphicdeveloper]

After giving this further thought, I think that what @ryanthompson591 wrote up in #210 is a great start, and sufficient for now. I do think there's an unusual opportunity to do something really "secure" with SIVIC, based on the fact that the API is all Promise-based and there's an opportunity to do something that virtually eliminates discrepancies if both parties can create a shared token or some other confirmation-based tracking system. However, simpler is better until a proven need and/or well-thought out proposal arise. ...So we can leave this open as a reminder and interesting thought topic, or we can close it and see if the community comes up with a need for something more than a new VAST 4.2 InteractiveStarted tracking event.

[amitshetty]

We will leave this around until the OM group asks for something in the SIMID API or specs... Unclear we have to do anything right now.