Online content created by website users rather than media owners or publishers - either through reviews, blogging, podcasting or posting comments, pictures or video clips.
Jargon Buster
VAST or ‘Video Ad-Serving Template’ provides a common ad response format for video players that enables video ads to be served on all compliant video players. This means that advertisers don’t need to integrate lots of different ad tags to be able to serve their video across multiple publishers. For more information about VAST see here.
A way of representing data (such as text, images, or audio) as numbers so an AI model can understand its meaning and compare it with other data.
A recommendation engine uses vector embeddings to identify products or content that are similar in meaning, helping advertisers show more relevant ads to users based on their interests.
Vector embeddings allow AI systems to understand relationships and similarity between content, improving search, targeting, recommendations, and personalisation in advertising.
Vertical
Contextual Targeting
Verticals are a subset of contextual and are used to group and categorise content that is contextually relevant to the same topic. The IAB Content Taxonomy provides a list of verticals that are widely accepted across the industry.
Vibe Coding
AI
A prompt-driven approach to building software where users describe what they want an AI system to create, then refine it through rapid iteration rather than traditional coding methods.
A marketing team uses AI tools to quickly prototype a campaign landing page by describing the layout, messaging, and features, then iteratively refining the output without writing code from scratch.
Vibe coding lowers the barrier to building digital experiences, allowing advertisers and non-technical teams to experiment, prototype, and launch ideas faster.
The informal categorisation of the resources used to develop, publish and distribute a video game.
Video on Demand (VOD) Services Advertiser VOD (AVOD) is an on-demand video content service that is funded by advertising.
This includes video services that are free to the user and hybrid solutions, which offer a subscription fee as well as showing ads. Broadcaster VOD services (e.g. ITV Hub) that are funded by advertising are included in this, but also YouTube, PlutoTV, etc. By using ad revenue, publishers can give viewers access to content for free or at a reduced rate.
A service that allows viewers to watch video content wherever and whenever they choose, rather than at the scheduled broadcast time.
Viewability is an online advertising metric that aims to determine only impressions that had the opportunity to be seen by users. For example, if an ad is loaded at the bottom of a webpage but a user doesn't scroll down far enough to see it, that impression would not be deemed viewable. Viewability is not a measure of ad effectiveness.