Creative Trafficking and Pre-Flight Campaign QA

Twenty-six percent of the creative delivered to us for trafficking last year carried at least one fault that would have broken tracking or rendering in flight. The most common single fault is an HTML5 bundle with a hard-coded href sitting next to an unused clickTag: it renders correctly, it clicks through correctly, and it reports nothing. The second is a video tag with no error tracker, so a creative that fails on one publisher's player fails invisibly for the length of the flight. Pre-flight checks: Every asset is opened, not scanned. HTML5 bundles are checked for clickTag wiring, initial load weight against the IAB LEAN limit of 150KB with polite load beyond it, and any call to an external host that a publisher's content security policy will block. Video is validated as VAST 4.2 with impression, quartile, click and error trackers all present, OMID where the placement is in-app, and no VPAID anywhere. Click and cachebuster macros are checked per demand platform, because the escaping differs and an unescaped click macro breaks the redirect chain silently. Third-party tags run in staging and then on a real handset on Etisalat and STC before they run anywhere else; regional latency turns a four-hop redirect chain into measurably lost clicks, and we count the hops and name the vendor to drop. Arabic and bilingual builds: Right-to-left is rebuilt, not mirrored. Logos, arrows, progress indicators and product shots do not flip; text, layout order and alignment do. Numerals are decided per market rather than assumed, since Eastern Arabic numerals read as native in some Gulf placements and as ornament in others. Font weight is checked at the actual ad size, because a large share of Arabic webfonts carry no true bold and the synthetic fallback renders as a smear at 300x250. Market rules that stop a flight: Saudi automotive finance disclosure. Responsible gaming footers and age gating in markets where the operator holds a licence, and no gambling creative at all where it does not. Beauty and personal care claim wording against UAE regulatory guidance, where a claim cleared for Europe does not clear here. We check these before trafficking, not after a publisher rejects the tag on a Thursday afternoon. Trafficking: Placement and creative naming from a single trafficking sheet that stays the source of truth for the flight, so reporting joins later without a lookup table somebody maintains by hand. Rotation, weighting and sequencing set as the plan intends rather than as the platform defaults. Landing pages verified live, with campaign and click-ID parameters surviving every redirect and any consent wall in between. What we refuse: We do not traffic a set we have not opened, including sets arriving from an agency who says they are already checked. We do not accept creative after go-live and push it into a paying flight without a checking window; we move the start date instead, and we will say that to your client on your behalf if it helps. We do not design, resize or produce. When a build is wrong we tell you what is wrong and who has to fix it, and we will not quietly repair the file while the studio keeps shipping the same fault into the next campaign. Not included: Concept, design, production, motion and copy. Media planning and demand platform management. If your studio needs a specification sheet before the next round we will write one inside the engagement, but we do not become the studio. Who this is not for: Teams running a handful of static banners a quarter on one platform. This pays for itself when several markets, languages, sizes and vendors are in flight at once and one broken macro costs a month of unmeasured spend.