A regional sports highlights publisher migrates from a third-party video player vendor to the Pub Clarity IMA-based player. Completion rate lifts 22%, pre-roll eCPM lifts 14%, and per-event reporting becomes available for the first time. Migration completes in four working days end-to-end.
The publisher operates a short-form sports highlights site serving readers across Vietnam. Content is video-first — three to seven highlight clips per match, each 45–120 seconds, embedded in match-recap articles. Monthly pageviews are approximately 1.8 million; video plays are approximately 2.6 million per month.
The previous player vendor (one of the regional video platforms) was selected in 2022 for ease of deployment. By early 2026, the publisher had three concerns: per-event reporting was limited to aggregate (no quartile data, no per-video performance), demand attribution was opaque (the publisher could not see which demand sources were contributing), and the player chrome was not themable beyond color selection.
The Pub Clarity conversation focused on what the migration would deliver vs cost. The promised deliverables were per-event reporting (quartiles, completion, skip, click), demand transparency (waterfall configuration with per-source attribution), and themable player chrome. The cost was the migration effort and the risk of regression during transition.
The migration ran in three phases over four working days. Day 1: content library re-indexing. The publisher's video catalog (approximately 14,000 active highlight clips) was indexed into the Pub Clarity content delivery configuration. Per-video metadata was preserved including title, match context, duration, and CDN URL.
Days 2–3: A/B parallel run. The Pub Clarity player was deployed on 30% of new article pages while the previous vendor continued to serve the other 70%. Per-side metrics were captured during this 48-hour window: completion rate, pre-roll eCPM, fill rate, and ad request rate. The A/B comparison showed Pub Clarity ahead on completion rate (78% vs 64%) and pre-roll eCPM ($11.40 vs $10.00) within the first 24 hours.
Day 4: full cutover. The previous vendor was disabled across all article pages; the Pub Clarity player took 100% of impressions. Reporting infrastructure was reconciled; the publisher confirmed that historical data was migrated and that go-forward reporting matched the dashboard view they had been using.
The 22% completion rate lift was the largest unexpected positive of the migration. We attribute it to two factors. First, the Google IMA SDK at the player core handles ad transitions, error recovery, and player resume logic more robustly than the previous vendor's in-house implementation. Failed ad creatives that previously broke the player session now fail gracefully, allowing the content video to play.
Second, viewability-aware refresh and tab-aware pausing reduced the impression count on out-of-view or out-of-tab content, which paradoxically lifted completion rate. The previous vendor's player counted impressions and completion events even when the player was not in view, which inflated the impression denominator and depressed the completion rate ratio. The IMA-based player counts only viewable impressions, so the ratio reflects actual viewer behavior.
A third factor that may have contributed: ad break length normalization. The previous vendor used a fixed 30-second pre-roll regardless of content length. The Pub Clarity player respects publisher-configured pre-roll length and skips pre-roll on clips under 60 seconds. Approximately 18% of the publisher's catalog is under 60 seconds; for those clips, no pre-roll fires, which improves the catalog-wide completion ratio.
The Pub Clarity dashboard surfaces video event reporting at the resolution the IMA SDK exposes: ad start, 25% quartile, 50% quartile, 75% quartile, completion, click, skip. Each event is logged per-impression with timestamps. The publisher can run reports across these events at any time grain (day, week, month) and any dimension (video, video category, demand source, time of day, device class).
The publisher's editorial team has used the per-event reporting to refine content choices. The data showed that clip lengths between 60 and 90 seconds had significantly higher completion rates than clips under 60s or over 120s. The team has tuned editorial selection to favor 60–90s clips where the underlying highlight allows.
Demand transparency unlocked a second operational change. The publisher's previous vendor reported aggregate revenue without per-source breakdown; the Pub Clarity dashboard shows per-demand-source revenue, fill rate, and CPM. The publisher's sales team has begun negotiating direct deals with the two strongest video demand sources identified through the reporting, which is expected to lift video CPM further in the next quarter.
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