What is the safe area in a mobile ad creative?

The region of the screen not occupied by hardware or system chrome — notches, rounded corners, the home indicator — plus whatever the ad container puts on top, which is usually its own close button in a top corner. Anything a user must read or tap belongs inside it; a layout anchored to raw screen coordinates rather than the safe area is the usual reason a CTA ends up cropped or under a system gesture.

The destination URL a creative opens when clicked, a convention inherited from banner advertising. In a playable it is distinct from the store-exit call: the clickTag is where the user goes, while mraid.open(), ExitApi.exit() or the network's equivalent is the mechanism that takes them there and reports the click.

What is the difference between a variant and a concept?

A variant is one version of an idea with a single variable changed; a concept is a genuinely different idea. Confusing them is why creative pipelines fatigue all at once — five variants of one concept are largely the same proposition to the auction and decay together, where genuinely different concepts give the model a real choice and decay on separate curves.

Playable Ad Glossary — 40 Terms for UA & Creative Teams

Q: What does IPM mean in mobile advertising?

Installs per mille — installs per thousand impressions. It is the headline creative-quality metric in mobile user acquisition because it isolates the creative's ability to convert an impression, independently of what you paid for that impression. It is the number most creative testing is ultimately trying to move.

Playable advertising borrows vocabulary from three fields that do not otherwise overlap much — game development, ad tech and performance marketing — which is why a conversation about one creative can contain MRAID, IPM and a break trigger in the same sentence and lose half the room. This is the working set, grouped by where the words come from.

Formats and creative types

A playable ad is a self-contained interactive HTML5 creative that lets the user try a slice of the product before installing. An interactive end card, often shortened to IEC, is the interactive screen shown after a video ad rather than a standalone unit; the technical requirements are usually identical, and the difference is placement. A video playable is a video with an interactive moment inserted into it, and a break is that interactive pause — a point where the video stops, the user does something, and playback resumes.

A rewarded placement is one the user opted into in exchange for an in-game benefit, so attention is granted up front and the ad cannot be skipped. An interstitial interrupts instead, which means it has to earn the attention it takes. A banner is the small persistent format; playables do not run there.

The technical layer

MRAID — Mobile Rich Media Ad Interface Definitions — is the IAB standard defining how a creative talks to the app container hosting it: viewability, container state, and the store redirect via mraid.open(). VAST is the XML manifest that tells a video player where a video ad lives and what to report. VPAID, the older mechanism for making video ads interactive, was deprecated by the IAB as of VAST 4.1 in favour of SIMID. OMID is the standard that lets third-party vendors measure viewability without their own SDK.

A clickTag is the destination URL a creative opens on a click, a convention inherited from banner advertising. A data URI is an asset encoded directly into the file as text rather than referenced by URL — the mechanism that makes a self-contained playable possible, at a cost of about a third in size. The safe area is the region of the screen not occupied by notches, home indicators or the container's own close button.

Base64 is the encoding used for data URIs. Subsetting is cutting a font down to only the glyphs actually used. Inlining is the general term for embedding an asset in the file rather than linking to it.

Per-network store exits

Because there is no single standard, each container provides its own call and using the wrong one means clicks go unreported. mraid.open() covers the MRAID networks — Unity, IronSource, AppLovin, Chartboost, InMobi and Vungle. ExitApi.exit() is Google's, loaded from exitapi.js. FbPlayableAd.onCTAClick() is Meta's, and Moloco uses the same API. window.install() is Mintegral's, which also expects gameReady and gameEnd lifecycle calls. window.openAppStore() is TikTok and Pangle's. Liftoff uses a postMessage bridge.

Performance metrics

IPM is installs per mille — installs per thousand impressions — and it is the headline creative-quality metric in mobile UA because it isolates the creative's ability to convert an impression. CTR is click-through rate, the share of impressions producing a click. CVR is conversion rate, usually clicks that become installs.

CPI is cost per install, CPM cost per thousand impressions, and eCPM the effective revenue per thousand impressions — the number publishers optimise and the reason a slow-loading creative loses delivery. CPA is cost per action for whatever post-install event you actually care about, and ROAS is return on ad spend, the ratio of revenue generated to money spent.

Engagement rate is the share of impressions producing any interaction, and it is the earliest warning signal of creative fatigue because it erodes before installs do. Completion rate is the share reaching the end state. Frequency is the average number of times a person has seen the creative, and it is the direct measure of the audience exhaustion that fatigue describes.

Attribution and measurement

An MMP — mobile measurement partner — is the third-party service that attributes installs to campaigns and creatives. SKAdNetwork is Apple's privacy-preserving attribution framework, which removed user-level attribution on iOS and made creative reporting depend on the campaign's source identifier. A postback is the delayed, aggregated report SKAdNetwork returns. A conversion value is the small encoded number an app sends to describe what a user did after install.

Deferred deep linking is the mechanism that carries context — which ad, which product, which choice — through an install so the app can use it on first open. Creative-level attribution is simply the ability to say which creative produced which result, which on iOS has to be designed into campaign structure rather than recovered afterwards.

Production vocabulary

The hook is the first few seconds whose job is to stop the dismissal. The tutorial or cue is whatever tells the player what to do — usually a hand or a highlight rather than text. The win state is the defined success condition, and the fail state what happens when the player does not reach it. The end card is the final screen carrying the CTA.

A variant is a version of one concept with a single variable changed; a concept is a genuinely different idea, and confusing the two is why creative pipelines fatigue all at once. Soft launch is the limited-market release used to test before global spend. Creative fatigue is the decay in performance caused by the addressable audience having already seen the ad.

A few more come up often enough in production to be worth having to hand. Time to interactive is how long after the creative starts loading the user can first act — the load measure that matters more than total load time. Orientation is whether a creative supports portrait, landscape or both; some networks require both, and a creative locked to one can end up letterboxed in a placement that shows the other. A ZIP package is the delivery format some networks use instead of a single HTML file, with the entry page at a set location inside the archive. A deep link opens a specific screen inside an installed app rather than its store page. Localisation is translating and refitting a creative's text for another market, which includes checking that the font covers the new characters.

Terms that get used loosely

Three worth pinning down. "Playable" is sometimes used for any interactive ad including simple tap-to-expand units — in this glossary it means a genuine interactive experience. "HTML5 ad" is a broader category that includes non-interactive rich media, so a playable is an HTML5 ad but not all HTML5 ads are playables. And "end card" is used both for the interactive final screen of a playable and for the static frame after a video; when it matters, say interactive end card.

Using shared vocabulary in a brief

Most of a glossary's value is realised in the brief. A request for “a playable with a fail state, a cue on the first move and the CTA at the win state, exported for the MRAID networks and Google” is unambiguous to everyone who has to build it. “Something fun with a button at the end” is not. When a term in a brief could be read two ways — end card is the usual offender — write out what you mean the first time it appears, and the rest of the conversation inherits the precision.

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