Creative Types and Rendering Keys

As described in more detail in Creatives, Creative Assets, Templates, Rules, Buzz allows you to associate Creative Assets with Creative Templates and does its best to render those assets into the right places in the templates without everything being finely specified by the API user. This document briefly explains the logic used for these associations.

How Do Rendering Keys Work?

The rendering_key is a field in the Creative Template object that tells Buzz how to associate assets with this template. For example, a Flash creative requires at least one SWF file and one image file (for backup) by setting the rendering_key to FLASH it tells Buzz to look for these types of files.

When you create a Creative and wish to take advantage of this rendering logic, you pass one or more unique ids for Creative Assets into the creative_assets field of the Creative. If the POST is successful, the creative_content field of the Creative will automatically be filled with the proper JSON for completing the template.

Rendering Key Overview

Rendering Key	Assets Expected in POST	Validation Logic
`NONE`	None	None
`IMAGE`	A single asset with a mime-type of `image/<whatever>`	No more than one asset, must be an image mime-type
`FLASH`	Two or more assets, at least one of which must be a SWF and one of which must have a mime-type of `image/<whatever>`	At least one of each type must be passed. If multiple SWFs or images are passed, the last one in the list is used
`VAST`	One Video Asset, with completed transcoding of one or more additional assets	The original video is not used in the template, just the transcoded versions. The versions must match those included in the template, and are identified by their filename/extension as being `swf`, `flv` or `webm`
`VPAID`	One Video Asset, with completed transcoding of one or more additional assets

Matching Creative Assets with Rendering Keys

You can use a special view to return a list of available Creative Templates for a given mime-type:

curl -X GET "[host]/rest/creative_template" -b cookies.txt -d '{"mime_type":"application/x-shockwave-flash", "view_name":"creative_template_mime_type_view"}'