Platform improvements — September 2026 - Elemental TV

A month of updates for ElementalTV.

Reporting and analytics

DOOH and co-viewing impressions count what was actually seen — Impressions are scaled by the multiplier the buyer won, and spend scales with them. Two new metrics sit alongside: Physical Impressions (the raw play count) and Avg Imp Multiplier. For traffic without a multiplier nothing changes.
No-bid vs. error, corrected — a well-formed bid we chose not to use is a no-bid; a broken bid or exchange is an error. Eleven reasons move from error to no-bid and gain a VALIDATION_ prefix; an unprefixed reason now always means one of your targeting rules fired. Expect error volume down and no-bid volume up by the same amount — delivery is unchanged.
Price Discovery — a new optimization tool that helps you earn more from your demand partners, with full visibility of its decisions in Tech Analytics and on the demand source form — a report opened for exactly the tool's window, and a downloadable summary of what is currently applied. Enabled per account by our team.

Ad serving and supply

Transaction IDs, end to end — an incoming source.tid (or the tid tag parameter) is forwarded to every demand partner unchanged; a per-supply-source setting generates one when supply sends none; a per-demand-source setting decides whether it is sent.
The VAST version follows the request — we return the highest VAST version your player or protocols signal, up to 4.3; the element set and order match that version's schema. With no signal the default stays 3.0, and a per-supply-source Default VAST version can pin it.
Ad pods: an explicit No deduplication option — selectable per supply source and signaled outbound as poddedupe=5, so demand can tell "no dedup requested" from "not specified".
Actions per concurrent call — each concurrent call to a demand source can carry its own Filter, Demand Price and Override actions with targeting profiles, applied in that order after sampling.
More MIME types in targeting and overrides — H.264, HLS segments, DASH manifests and two HEVC forms.

Creative Library

Political and COPPA flags — four new filters in the Creative Library and four matching attributes in Allow/Block profiles: Political Ad, COPPA Relevant, Offensive Content, Unreasonable Claims. The View Metadata tab shows Political and COPPA details when a creative qualifies.

In the app

Product updates in the header — a bell in the ElementalTV App and 1Audience opens this changelog without leaving the app.
VAST Validator — under Tools: paste a VAST document or fetch a URL and check it against the same parser the ad server uses. It answers OK or a plain-language reason; it checks whether Elemental TV can accept the tag, not spec compliance.
Segment targeting, redesigned — the segment picker in targeting profiles shows provider, status and CPM per segment, groups contextual segments by category and subcategory, and filters by audience ID type, provider, type and name.
Reports on mobile and tablet — the Reports page adapts to narrow screens; desktop is unchanged.
Inventory type at a glance — the Inventories list shows and filters by Site, App or DOOH.

Sales Agent (AdCP)

Self-serve buy management — buyers can pause, resume, cancel and re-budget their own media buys.
Creative preflight — validate_input checks a creative manifest against a canonical format or one of our products before anything is booked.
Usage reporting — buyers or their measurement vendor report usage records per period; the seller reconciles them against its own state and supports replay-safe retries.
Creatives read-back and display creatives — list_creatives returns inline creatives with status and package assignments; display creatives are accepted where the format allows.
Campaign governance, phase one (experimental) — register a governance agent per account; a media buy that names a plan is checked with it before anything is committed.
Truthful catalogs — products publish only the properties their deal actually covers, accepted durations as real ranges, and no forecast reach figure until we can compute one per deal.

For integrators

DOOH bids need a reconcilable display time — a bid whose display time (dt) falls more than about 135 minutes after the request is rejected with reason IMP_DT.
The deadline we send you follows your round trip — the tmax in our bid requests now accounts for your measured network round trip instead of a flat reserve.
Pod responses that reuse one bid.id across several bids are accepted — the uniqueness check that dropped whole responses is gone.
Report reason labels changed — eleven no-bid reasons now carry a VALIDATION_ prefix; update filters or mirrors that key on the old labels.
Inventories API — GET /api/v2/inventories now returns the type field.

Fixes

Blocking a category now blocks everything under it — blocked and allowed category lists are matched hierarchy-aware across every taxonomy, and an exchange's vendor-specific sensitive-category codes are honored.
Ad Pod ID and Slot Position overrides are honored on dynamic pods.
Structured user agent versions arrive intact — version components keep their order and repeats, for parsed and passed-through values alike.
Every ad in a multi-ad response carries its own ad identifier.
Copy across the apps — one vocabulary and one shape for confirmations and notifications, US spelling everywhere, and 34 wording defects fixed.
Chrome no longer offers to translate the ElementalTV App.

What's next

Price Discovery decisions driven by a model, and sensitive-category controls in the Creative Library.

Questions → support@elementaltv.com