Creative JavaScript API introduced in AdCreator 3

The main technical challenge in rich media mobile advertising is ensuring the quality and reliability of the ad experience across different devices, operating systems, advertising networks and publishers. This is exactly the issue AdCreator addresses. In AdCreator, we provide the tools that let you focus on creativity, while we take on the burden of technical challenges. We achieve this by putting a layer of abstraction between you, our user, and your goal — a rich media mobile ad that “just works”.
While having a powerful abstraction layer between you and all the technical issues is obviously very useful and timesaving, in some cases it can also be limiting. We have always been aware that AdCreator does not support everything that the creative minds of our users can imagine. To address these limitations, we introduced the Frame component and the “Execute JavaScript” action in AdCreator 2, which let you customize your creative by writing your own JavaScript code.

The main technical challenge in rich media mobile advertising is ensuring the quality and reliability of the ad experience across different devices, operating systems, advertising networks and publishers. This is exactly the issue AdCreator addresses. In AdCreator, we provide the tools that let you focus on creativity, while we take on the burden of technical challenges. We achieve this by putting a layer of abstraction between you, our user, and your goal — a rich media mobile ad that “just works”.

While having a powerful abstraction layer between you and all the technical issues is obviously very useful and timesaving, in some cases it can also be limiting. We have always been aware that AdCreator does not support everything that the creative minds of our users can imagine. To address these limitations, we introduced the Frame component and the “Execute JavaScript” action in AdCreator 2, which let you customize your creative by writing your own JavaScript code.

Frame component and “Execute JavaScript” action gave you freedom to go beyond what AdCreator can do. However, this still had one major drawback. By letting you “bypass” our abstraction layer and directly manipulate the final output of AdCreator, we could no longer guarantee that your ad will work as intended everywhere. This is the problem we wanted to solve in the first place.

We recently introduced the Creative JavaScript API in AdCreator 3. Our goal with this API is to give you the best of both worlds. On the one hand you get the power and flexibility of using code to create advanced user experiences. On the other, you get to keep our guarantees that your ad will work as it should. The API gives developers access to all the features of AdCreator. Any screen, component or action that you create via the UI, you can now also interact with in your code, via the API.

What will you be able to do with our JavaScript API? The usual programming concepts, like calculations, loops, recursions or callbacks, can be used to create complex animations and other advanced behaviors. A common use case for this would be games. Another popular use case would be accessing 3rd-party APIs. For example, you may want to integrate your ad with social networks, pull product information from an e-commerce API or display content from an RSS feed.

The JavaScript API is available to all AdCreator 3 accounts. You will find the link to the API documentation inside the code editor. This documentation can help you get started.

This, of course, is just the first version of our JavaScript API and we plan to evolve it further in the future. Feel free to ask us questions and give us feedback. Getting to know your use cases will surely help us steer the development of the API in the right direction.