One Active Banner in Email/Newsletter Zones.

A knowledge base article on why only one active banner is permitted in Email/Newsletter Zones.

Revive Adserver has an Email/Newsletter Zone type, which exists specifically for the purpose of delivering banners as part of an email campaign. The Email/Newsletter Zone only allows one active banner to be linked to the zone at a time.

The reason for this is as follows:

• As stated above, the entire purpose of the zone is to allow banners to be delivered as part of an email campaign.
• Therefore, the invocation tag for the Email/Newsletter Zones has been designed to be as widely compatible with email clients as possible.
• This means that the zone has been designed to work:
  • Using only HTML - no JavaScript is used, as JavaScript is not supported by most email clients; and
  • Without using cookies, as cookies are not supported by most email clients.

• As a result of the above two design considerations, the invocation tag for Email/Newsletter Zones looks something like this:
  
  

  <a href='http://www.example.com/revive-adserver/www/delivery/ck.php?zoneid=5' target='_blank'> <img src='http://www.example.com/revive-adserver/www/delivery/avw.php?zoneid=5' border='0' alt='' /></a>

• As can be seen in the above, there are two elements to the tag: a hard coded link for the banner image (based on the zone ID), which is wrapped in an HTML anchor, which provides the link that the user should go to when they click on the banner (also based on the zone ID).
• Due to the design constraints listed above (no JavaScript), it is impossible to dynamically insert the click URL - basing it on the zone ID is the only possibility.
• Also due to the design constraints listed above (no cookies), it is impossible to store in the email client which banner has been delivered, for later use (i.e. when the user clicks on the banner) by Revive Adserver.
• As a result of these above two constraints, the only option that Revive Adserver can take is to only allow one banner to be active in the Email/Newsletter Zone at a time, so that, when a click request comes in for the zone, there will only be one active banner, and the click URL for the user to be sent to can be determined.

This is why Revive Adserver only allows one banner to be active at a time in Email/Newsletter Zones.