SHARC: Secure HTML Ad Rich-Media Container

Last updated: January 3, 2024

About SHARC

Write one ad; serve if anywhere!

What if you could write one ad and serve that file to any ad display platform and know that it would just work: in a mobile app, in a webpage, in a game system, or even in digital out-of-home (DOOH)? That’s our goal with SHARC.

SHARC is a standardized ‘safe ad container’ API that enables interactive ads to be served across  mobile-app, web, and other HTML-enabled environments, in a secure iframe which prevents the ad from being able to access sensitive page and user data. 

For the sell side, SHARC enables publishers to offer rich ad functionality for brands, while protecting their properties from the risk of data leakage and functional errors that can be introduced from external sources.

For the buy side, the standardized ad container can be served across any SHARC-enabled platform or medium, reducing the number of creatives that need to be developed for a cross-platform campaign. It simplifies ad development and in turn reduces the ad load on ad servers, which helps to reduce costs and makes it easier to expand campaigns to new platforms and channels. 

SHARC succeeds two standards — SafeFrame for web and MRAID for mobile — it addresses inefficiencies that prevented safe ad containers from working across multiple platforms in the past.

We released a first draft of the spec for public comment in April 2022, and released a final draft in December 2022. We have a lot of work to do to build the reference implementation, sample ad creative, and education for a big adoption push of this new standard in 2023.

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