TABLET ADVERTISING GUIDELINES – BRW & SMI

Supported Operating Systems & App Downloads

• iOS4+
  • BRW
  • SMI

Common Specifications for Tablet In-page Adverts

Please refer to the article and weather inline ads page.

Common Specifications For Full Page 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.
• Files must run locally (and are executed on file:// protocol)
• Every booking for full page interstitial placements must include at least one of the four standard creative. Please refer to the templates provided in this document.
• Each creative must be packaged into a single Zip file containing all assets (HTML, CSS, JS, images)
  Your creative is delivered to the app in this zipped package
  Please note that the HTML page – or the first of a series of HTML pages (if applicable) – must be named index.html for our application to recognise and load it.
  This index.html file must be located in the root of the directory, where root is <your-creative-folder.zip>
• Assets for both orientations are mandatory and orientation changes must be handled by CSS*
• 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.
  • Please follow the instructions in each of the templates. Do not change any code that isn’t indicated. Creative submitted with altered code base will be considered as custom execution. 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.
• A standard tablet close button must be included in every full page creative, using the following HTML snippet:

<a class="closeBtn" href="button:close">Close</a>

• Standard Fairfax internal tracking mechanism – as provided in our templates – must be retained in all standard and custom executions:

<script type='text/javascript' src='resources/javascript/tracking.js'></script>

Additionally, if video is present in the execution, the tracking mechanism requires the following two scripts:

<video id="videoPlayer"></video>

    <!-- Do not modify the reference to the Fairfax tracking framework  -->

    <script type='text/javascript' src='resources/javascript/tracking.js'>

        TabletTracking.trackVideoEvents('videoPlayer'); // where 'videoPlayer' is the ID of the video element

    </script>

• Creative must be optimised for both landscape and portrait orientations
• No flickering animations / strobing effects allowed.
• Daily creative file size limit is 1.2MB regardless of the number of executions in rotation
• 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 &amp 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

The Resources Library

Full Page Advertising creative for Fairfax’s tablet apps have an extensive JavaScript library at disposal (see files listed below). This library is referenced from the creative package via a symbolic link [../resources]. You should utilise these resources wherever possible as these files are not counted in your total creative file size limit. You can create custom classes / objects (“plug-ins”) based upon these libraries. Make sure that you save these custom scripts as separate files and include them within your creative directory. Do not modify the original resource files and do not use concurrent jquery versions as these may cause conflicts at runtime.

Click here to download the current resources JavaScript Library.

The current version of our resources library is 5.3 which includes the following files (including their respective file hashes):