These guidelines are available for SMH for the iPad, The Age for the iPad, The Canberra Times for iPad with iOS4+ Operating System installed. Fairfax offers platform specific advertising opportunities to its clients on a range of tablet devices.
There are two types of creative options available at present. The full page interstitials are displayed in the index page and article flow, while the more traditional in-page banner advertising is available in article pages. There are 3 standard interstitial products (Tablet Full Page Static, Tablet Full Page Video, Tablet Full Page Image & Video Carousel) which require a set of pre defined elements.
Fairfax welcomes custom HTML5 full page executions and emphasises the importance of a collaborative approach to these projects. Please contact your account manager prior to commencing creative production.
Supported Operating Systems & App Downloads
Common Specifications for Tablet In-page Adverts
Please refer to the article and weather inline ads page.
Common Specifications for Full Page and Custom Tablet Ads
The following specifications are applicable to all standard and custom ad creative produced for Fairfax’s tablet applications.
- The Full Page Tablet interstitials accept creative built in HTML5 using CSS3 and JavaScript, which is delivered to the native WebView (a.k.a. ‘in-app’ or ‘mini-browser’) to render and display.
- Assets for both orientations are mandatory and orientation changes must be handled by CSS*
- Initial animation should be triggered on call of pageActive() JavaScript function (called by the native app when the ad is brought into view).
- Link operations should be handled by standard HTML (i.e. <a> tag)* and the landing page must open within the in-app web browser.
- Video player implementations should follow the native HTML5 <video> tag implementation guides and must retain basic video controls, such as a toggle play/pause and mute/unmute or volume control slider. Please follow our corresponding template.
- The creative must be tested and run in the device’s native browser before submission. It is recommended that you also test the creative in WebView, the OS provided in-app browser module, which is used to display your full-page advertising creative.
- Remember that even if your advertisement works smoothly in the native browser on an iPad it may not when implemented within our app due to the amount of processing power available or some differences between the rendering engines of the native browser and WebView. Fairfax has no control over these aspects as they are native to the Operating System.
- Note, however that creative, which does not work in the native browser will not function within WebView either.
- While Fairfax encourages you to submit custom creative and will test and feed back on these, it is not liable to troubleshoot foreign code, other than providing feedback when bugs are encountered.
- Creative must be optimised for both landscape and portrait orientations
- No flickering animations / strobing effects allowed.
- Total creative file size limit is 1.2MB.
- Click-through must be a text link or button and its size appropriate to the associated CTA / copy length. While touch interface design principles are encouraged (e.g. appropriate padding around links and buttons), extensive (e.g. full page) linked areas are not acceptable.
* Our findings show that WebView’s JavaScript implementation in regards to Orientation handling is unreliable. Furthermore, JavaScript controlled link handling, e.g. window.open() or location.href() functions – to mention only some examples – interfere with native operations.
NB: Other, not-listed functionality may also cause operational errors which may only be feed back upon experience through the creative testing process.
Notes & Recommendations
- Consider typeface sizes for legibility
- Photo-realistic images should be in JPG format for optimal compression.
- Using transparency can significantly increase the size of your image files, so you should avoid it as much as possible. If some of your images require transparency, you can use either GIF or PNG format. PNG images have higher quality, but are generally larger in size. If you need to use PNG images, you should use an image optimising utility (e.g. PNGCrush) to compress them as much as possible
- You can use CSS tiled backgrounds and WebKit gradients to help reduce overall file size
Third party tracking
In order to preserve user experience, full page iPad ads are preloaded in the device’s memory prior to being displayed. As such, Fairfax reported impressions are only counted when the ad is brought into 100% view by the user. Fairfax reported impression counts are likely to be lower than those recorded by advertisers’ 3rd party ad servers – this is normal behaviour and in no way impacts the delivery or performance of full page ads. Therefore 3rd party impression tracking is supported but not recommended. 3rd party click tracking is supported.
Rich media tracking
Any rich media reporting must be implemented into ads by the creative agency prior to being uploaded to advertisers’ 3rd party ad servers. Fairfax are unable to provide rich media reporting metrics for 3rd party ads over and above user clicks and page impressions.
Initial tests have been carried out using creatives built in Doubleclick Studio V2 and served through Doubleclick for Advertisers (DFA) adserver , however you are welcome to implement your preferred vendor’s tracking mechanism, subject to testing.
